Brad DeLong's Grasping Realityhttps://www.bradford-delong.com/
If you would rather just see Highlighted Posts...en-US2019-03-21T12:01:00-07:00

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/federal-reserve-bends-to-economic-reality-bloomberg.html
**John Authers**: _[Things Are Finally Looking Up for Theresa May](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-21/federal-reserve-bends-to-economic-reality-jti3zccy)_: "EU... patience has run out and they do not want to waste more time waiting for the infuriating British to make up their minds.... EU leaders have decided that they are ready for a no-deal Brexit and could handle the consequences. This is probably not true of the U.K. And so the EU is prepared to risk forcing the issue, and forsaking the (still slim) chance that the U.K. might yet decide to stay. Thus, Theresa May, for whom personal support appears to have evaporated, might conceivably be in position to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat... ---- #noted<p><strong>John Authers</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-21/federal-reserve-bends-to-economic-reality-jti3zccy">Things Are Finally Looking Up for Theresa May</a></em>: "EU... patience has run out and they do not want to waste more time waiting for the infuriating British to make up their minds.... EU leaders have decided that they are ready for a no-deal Brexit and could handle the consequences. This is probably not true of the U.K. And so the EU is prepared to risk forcing the issue, and forsaking the (still slim) chance that the U.K. might yet decide to stay. Thus, Theresa May, for whom personal support appears to have evaporated, might conceivably be in position to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-21T12:01:00-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/amazon-offers-cautionary-tale-of-ai-assisted-hiring-financial-times.html
The real lesson, I think, from AI-machine learning is that AI-machine learning is a lot like "human judgment"—we have remarkably little insight into what features decisions of the situation are salient to the mind or to the whatever that is actually making the deciding. Thus this is not just a cautionry tale for AI-machine learning, it is also a cautionary tale for human "experts": **Andrew Hill**: _[Amazon Offers Cautionary Tale Of AI-Assisted Hiring](https://www.ft.com/content/5039715c-14f9-11e9-a168-d45595ad076d)_: "Amazon, one of the most innovative and data-rich companies in the world, leapt on that possibility as early as 2014. It built a recruiting engine that analysed applications submitted to the group over the preceding decade and identified patterns. The idea was it would then spot candidates in the job market who would be worth recruiting... >..."Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one person familiar with the initiative told Reuters, which broke the story in October. Unfortunately, the data were dominated by applications from men, and the AI taught itself to prefer male candidates, discriminating against CVs that referred to “women’s” clubs, and setting aside graduates from certain all-women’s colleges. The initiative was downgraded and the research team scrapped. Amazon has claimed it never used the programme to...<p>The real lesson, I think, from AI-machine learning is that AI-machine learning is a lot like "human judgment"—we have remarkably little insight into what features decisions of the situation are salient to the mind or to the whatever that is actually making the deciding. Thus this is not just a cautionry tale for AI-machine learning, it is also a cautionary tale for human "experts": <strong>Andrew Hill</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/5039715c-14f9-11e9-a168-d45595ad076d">Amazon Offers Cautionary Tale Of AI-Assisted Hiring</a></em>: "Amazon, one of the most innovative and data-rich companies in the world, leapt on that possibility as early as 2014. It built a recruiting engine that analysed applications submitted to the group over the preceding decade and identified patterns. The idea was it would then spot candidates in the job market who would be worth recruiting...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>..."Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one person familiar with the initiative told Reuters, which broke the story in October. Unfortunately, the data were dominated by applications from men, and the AI taught itself to prefer male candidates, discriminating against CVs that referred to “women’s” clubs, and setting aside graduates from certain all-women’s colleges. The initiative was downgraded and the research team scrapped. Amazon has claimed it never used the programme to evaluate applicants...</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-21T11:50:58-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/kate-bahn-on-twitter-some-good-resources-are-beyond-economic-man-and-toward-a-feminist-philosophy-of-economics-i-particula.html
In response to a query from Nancy M. Birdsall on what are the most important contributions to feminist economics, Equitable Growth's Kate Bahn provides a shoutout to, among others, my college classmate Joyce Jacobsen of Wesleyan—who got me my first economics RA job: **Kate Bahn**: _["Some good resources](https://twitter.com/LipstickEcon/status/1086344224096874497)_ are _Beyond Economic Man_ and _Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics_. I particularly like Joyce Jacobsen's essay on 'Some implications of the feminist project in economics for empirical methodology' in the latter... ---- #noted<p>In response to a query from Nancy M. Birdsall on what are the most important contributions to feminist economics, Equitable Growth's Kate Bahn provides a shoutout to, among others, my college classmate Joyce Jacobsen of Wesleyan—who got me my first economics RA job: <strong>Kate Bahn</strong>: <em><a href="https://twitter.com/LipstickEcon/status/1086344224096874497">"Some good resources</a></em> are <em>Beyond Economic Man</em> and <em>Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics</em>. I particularly like Joyce Jacobsen's essay on 'Some implications of the feminist project in economics for empirical methodology' in the latter...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-21T11:47:43-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-good-jobs-challenge-by-dani-rodrik-project-syndicate.html
Dani Rodrik has, I think, a better way to frame the problems that he and Richard Baldwin are both thinking about this winter: **Dani Rodrik**: _[The Good Jobs Challenge](https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/how-countries-can-create-middle-class-jobs-by-dani-rodrik-2019-02)_: "[For] developing countries... existing technologies allow insufficient room for factor substitution: using less-skilled labor instead of skilled professionals or physical capital. The demanding quality standards needed to supply global value chains cannot be easily met by replacing machines with manual labor. This is why globally integrated production in even the most labor-abundant countries, such as India or Ethiopia, relies on relatively capital-intensive methods.... The standard remedy of improving educational institutions does not yield near-term benefits, while the economy’s most advanced sectors are unable to absorb the excess supply of low-skilled workers. Solving this problem may require... boosting an intermediate range of labor-intensive, low-skilled economic activities. Tourism and non-traditional agriculture... public employment ... non-tradable services carried out by small and medium-size enterprises, will not be among the most productive, which is why they are rarely the focus of industrial or innovation policies. But they may still provide significantly better jobs than the alternatives in the informal sector... ---- #noted<p>Dani Rodrik has, I think, a better way to frame the problems that he and Richard Baldwin are both thinking about this winter: <strong>Dani Rodrik</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/how-countries-can-create-middle-class-jobs-by-dani-rodrik-2019-02">The Good Jobs Challenge</a></em>: "[For] developing countries... existing technologies allow insufficient room for factor substitution: using less-skilled labor instead of skilled professionals or physical capital. The demanding quality standards needed to supply global value chains cannot be easily met by replacing machines with manual labor. This is why globally integrated production in even the most labor-abundant countries, such as India or Ethiopia, relies on relatively capital-intensive methods.... The standard remedy of improving educational institutions does not yield near-term benefits, while the economy’s most advanced sectors are unable to absorb the excess supply of low-skilled workers. Solving this problem may require... boosting an intermediate range of labor-intensive, low-skilled economic activities. Tourism and non-traditional agriculture... public employment ... non-tradable services carried out by small and medium-size enterprises, will not be among the most productive, which is why they are rarely the focus of industrial or innovation policies. But they may still provide significantly better jobs than the alternatives in the informal sector...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-21T11:46:02-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/eg-these-5-charts-show-inequality-is-bad-for-your-health-even-if-you-are-rich-marketwatch.html
Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, newly-installed over at EPI, is doing a bang-up job: **Pedro Nicolaci da Costa**: _[These 5 Charts Show Inequality Is Bad for Your Health—Even If You Are Rich](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-5-charts-show-inequality-is-bad-for-your-health-even-if-you-are-rich-2019-02-20?mod=mw_share_twitter)_: "Pickett and Wilkinson kept coming back to a single uniting factor—inequality: 'What the research shows—not just ours but that of hundreds of researchers around the world—is that inequality brings out features of our evolved psychology, to do with dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority, and that affects how we treat one another and ourselves, it increases status competition and anxiety, anxieties about our self worth, worries about how we are seen and judged'.... Here are five charts from their presentation... ---- #noted<p>Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, newly-installed over at EPI, is doing a bang-up job: <strong>Pedro Nicolaci da Costa</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-5-charts-show-inequality-is-bad-for-your-health-even-if-you-are-rich-2019-02-20?mod=mw_share_twitter">These 5 Charts Show Inequality Is Bad for Your Health—Even If You Are Rich</a></em>: "Pickett and Wilkinson kept coming back to a single uniting factor—inequality: 'What the research shows—not just ours but that of hundreds of researchers around the world—is that inequality brings out features of our evolved psychology, to do with dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority, and that affects how we treat one another and ourselves, it increases status competition and anxiety, anxieties about our self worth, worries about how we are seen and judged'.... Here are five charts from their presentation...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-21T11:43:22-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/question-howe-long-before-internet-searches-for-delong-economist-come-up-not-with-me-but-with-this-guy.html
Question: How long before internet searches for "Delong economist" come up not with me but with this guy?: **Delong Meng**: _[Optimal Mechanisms for Repeated Communication](http://web.stanford.edu/~delong13/jmp.pdf)_: "We consider a repeated communication model with a long-run sender and a long-run receiver.... A biased adviser who prefers policy θ + b, whereas the receiver wants to implement policy θ. The sender’s utility is uS(a,θ) = -(a−θ−b)2, and the receiver’s utility is uR(a,θ)= −(a−θ)2.... For the optimal mechanism the receiver chooses a function a(ht) that maximizes her expected payoff with respect to the sender’s incentive constraint.... We characterize the payoff set as the discount factor goes to one, and we analyze the rate of convergence to points on the frontier of this limit payoff set... ---- #noted<p>Question: How long before internet searches for "Delong economist" come up not with me but with this guy?: <strong>Delong Meng</strong>: <em><a href="http://web.stanford.edu/~delong13/jmp.pdf">Optimal Mechanisms for Repeated Communication</a></em>: "We consider a repeated communication model with a long-run sender and a long-run receiver.... A biased adviser who prefers policy θ + b, whereas the receiver wants to implement policy θ. The sender’s utility is u<sub>S</sub>(a,θ) = -(a−θ−b)<sup>2</sup>, and the receiver’s utility is u<sub>R</sub>(a,θ)= −(a−θ)<sup>2</sup>.... For the optimal mechanism the receiver chooses a function a(ht) that maximizes her expected payoff with respect to the sender’s incentive constraint.... We characterize the payoff set as the discount factor goes to one, and we analyze the rate of convergence to points on the frontier of this limit payoff set...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-21T10:47:54-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-life-and-opinions-of-andrew-rilstone.html
**Andrew Rilstone**: _[The Opening of the Gospel of Mark](http://www.andrewrilstone.com/)_: "I almost wish that Mark's Gospel could be presented in some kind of Tony Harrison pidgin: 'God-Is-Gracious dips people in the Desolation./God-Is-Gracious heralds dipping to change their minds and undo their near-misses./Everyone from Praise-Land comes!/Everyone from Peace-town!/They are all dipped in the Flowing/Acknowledging their near-misses... ---- #noted<p><strong>Andrew Rilstone</strong>: <em><a href="http://www.andrewrilstone.com/">The Opening of the Gospel of Mark</a></em>: "I almost wish that Mark's Gospel could be presented in some kind of Tony Harrison pidgin: 'God-Is-Gracious dips people in the Desolation./God-Is-Gracious heralds dipping to change their minds and undo their near-misses./Everyone from Praise-Land comes!/Everyone from Peace-town!/They are all dipped in the Flowing/Acknowledging their near-misses...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-21T10:24:53-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/eg-capitalists-in-the-twenty-first-century.html
A brilliant paper. But I have a worry: those at the upper tail of the income distribution are, to a substantial degree, those whose broadly-construed portfolios are ludicrously risky who happen to be unusually lucky. I am not sure they have properly accounted for luck here: **Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen M. Zidar, and Eric Zwick**: _[Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century](https://www.nber.org/papers/w25442)_: "Entrepreneurs who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Most top income is non-wage income, a primary source of which is private business profit. These profits accrue to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Private business profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death... >...Classifying three-quarters of private business profit as human capital income, we find that most top earners are working rich: they derive most of their income from human capital, not physical or financial capital. The human capital income of private business owners exceeds top wage income and top public equity income. Growth in private business profit is explained by both rising productivity and a rising share of value added accruing to owners... ---- #noted<p>A brilliant paper. But I have a worry: those at the upper tail of the income distribution are, to a substantial degree, those whose broadly-construed portfolios are ludicrously risky who happen to be unusually lucky. I am not sure they have properly accounted for luck here: <strong>Matthew Smith, Danny Yagan, Owen M. Zidar, and Eric Zwick</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w25442">Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century</a></em>: "Entrepreneurs who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Most top income is non-wage income, a primary source of which is private business profit. These profits accrue to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Private business profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...Classifying three-quarters of private business profit as human capital income, we find that most top earners are working rich: they derive most of their income from human capital, not physical or financial capital. The human capital income of private business owners exceeds top wage income and top public equity income. Growth in private business profit is explained by both rising productivity and a rising share of value added accruing to owners...</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T18:38:20-07:00Raising the Curtain: Trade and Empirehttps://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/raising-the-curtain-the-long-twentieth-centurytrade-and-empire-yet-another-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-e.html
Yet Another Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century, 1870-2016" ---- ## Raising the Curtain: The Long Twentieth Century—Trade and Empire The extent to which the navies and trading fleets of the great European sea-borne empires of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries shaped the industrial development of western Europe has always been one of the most fiercely-debated and unsettled topics in economic history. That European expansion in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were catastrophes for the regions of west Africa that were the sources of the slave trade; for the Amerindians of the Caribbean; for the Aztecs, Incas, the mound-builders of the Mississippi valley; and for the princes of Bengal and others who found themselves competing with the British East India Company in the succession wars over the spoils of India’s Moghul Empire—that is not in dispute. But how much did pre-industrial trade and plunder affect European development? That is not so clear. It is clear is that even at the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century trade not in luxuries but in staples had begun to profoundly shape history. For the first time transoceanic trade...<p>Yet Another Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century, 1870-2016"</p>
<hr />
<p><img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f080038834022ad378f7ac200d-pi" alt="Il Quarto Stato" title="Il_Quarto_Stato.png" border="0" width="749" height="96" /></p>
<h2>Raising the Curtain: The Long Twentieth Century—Trade and Empire</h2>
<p>The extent to which the navies and trading fleets of the great European sea-borne empires of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries shaped the industrial development of western Europe has always been one of the most fiercely-debated and unsettled topics in economic history. That European expansion in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were catastrophes for the regions of west Africa that were the sources of the slave trade; for the Amerindians of the Caribbean; for the Aztecs, Incas, the mound-builders of the Mississippi valley; and for the princes of Bengal and others who found themselves competing with the British East India Company in the succession wars over the spoils of India’s Moghul Empire—that is not in dispute. </p>
<p>But how much did pre-industrial trade and plunder affect European development? That is not so clear.</p>
<p>It is clear is that even at the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century trade not in luxuries but in staples had begun to profoundly shape history. For the first time transoceanic trade mattered not just for a ruling elite but for an economy as a whole. The export of cotton from the American South and had mattered. Without the appetite of British and New England factories for cotton and the power to ship ginned cotton to them cheaply, the slaves of the American South in 1860 would have been what they were for George Washington in the 1790s: a quarter of your wealth that you were willing to free, at least upon your death, because it was the right thing to do. By contrast, for Jefferson Davis it wasn’t his land but rather his slaves that were three-quarters of his wealth—and so the U.S. Civil War of 1861-5 came. </p>
<p>Early-nineteenth century cotton showed what late-eighteenth century sugar had prefigured. The export of sugar from the Caribbean islands and Latin America (and also tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, and so forth) meant that European agriculture did not have to grow nearly as much flax or raise as much wool or produce as many calories. It provided an extra edge to the British economy: as if there was perhaps one additional ghost worker who did not have to be fed or paid alongside every ten. </p>
<p>That, from the perspective of 1870, was what the expanded intercontinental division of labor and the higher productivity that resulted from it had done up to that point. </p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#slouchingtowardsutopia #outtakes #economichistory
</code></pre>
#economichistory#slouchingtowardsutopiaJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T13:25:27-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/nine-days-from-brexit-day-does-anyone-have-a-clue-whats-happening-james-felton-opinion-the-guardian.html
**James Felton**: _[Nine days from ‘Brexit day’, does anyone have a clue what’s happening?](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/20/nine-days-brexit-clue-extension-liechtenstein)_: "We’re begging for an extension and seeking trade deals with the mighty Liechtenstein. Everything is fine.... It was admittedly quite funny that Theresa May is in the position of defending getting people to vote over and over again until she gets the result that she wanted.... After the announcement, some ERG members expressed dismay that they weren’t allowed to vote again (see how funny this is?) Strongly approve of Bercow making decisions based on how funny they are to people who retain the capacity for rational thinking)....If only they’d treated the meaningful vote more like a meaningful vote and less like tantric legislative foreplay before a full 29 March climax, but you live and learn.... So here we are. Nine days to go, hoping that 27 countries that May said would be crushed if they didn’t offer her a good deal are kind enough to all let us stay a little longer if we beg. If we’ve annoyed any one of them enough, say, by calling them Nazis or likening them to Soviet prisons for the past three years, they could veto our extension... ---- #noted<p><strong>James Felton</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/20/nine-days-brexit-clue-extension-liechtenstein">Nine days from ‘Brexit day’, does anyone have a clue what’s happening?</a></em>: "We’re begging for an extension and seeking trade deals with the mighty Liechtenstein. Everything is fine.... It was admittedly quite funny that Theresa May is in the position of defending getting people to vote over and over again until she gets the result that she wanted.... After the announcement, some ERG members expressed dismay that they weren’t allowed to vote again (see how funny this is?) Strongly approve of Bercow making decisions based on how funny they are to people who retain the capacity for rational thinking)....If only they’d treated the meaningful vote more like a meaningful vote and less like tantric legislative foreplay before a full 29 March climax, but you live and learn.... So here we are. Nine days to go, hoping that 27 countries that May said would be crushed if they didn’t offer her a good deal are kind enough to all let us stay a little longer if we beg. If we’ve annoyed any one of them enough, say, by calling them Nazis or likening them to Soviet prisons for the past three years, they could veto our extension...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T13:10:33-07:00“An Extraordinary Episode in the Economic Progress of Man!”: Yet Another Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century, 1870-1914"https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/an-extraordinary-episode-in-the-economic-progress-of-man-yet-another-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-econ.html
DIE, DARLINGS, DIE!!!!! ---- ## “An Extraordinary Episode in the Economic Progress of Man!” Yet all in all it is not possible to see the 1870-1914 making of the single global economy—and society—as anything other than an extraordinary and wonderful episode in the history of humanity. Looking back from 1919 on the optimistic, economists’ world that he had thought he had lived in up until the start of World War I in August 1914, John Maynard Keynes wrote, in his Keynes-centric upper-class-focused way: >What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!... Conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.... He...<p>DIE, DARLINGS, DIE!!!!!</p>
<hr />
<p><img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f080038834022ad378f7ac200d-pi" alt="Il Quarto Stato" title="Il_Quarto_Stato.png" border="0" width="749" height="96" /></p>
<h2>“An Extraordinary Episode in the Economic Progress of Man!”</h2>
<p>Yet all in all it is not possible to see the 1870-1914 making of the single global economy—and society—as anything other than an extraordinary and wonderful episode in the history of humanity. Looking back from 1919 on the optimistic, economists’ world that he had thought he had lived in up until the start of World War I in August 1914, John Maynard Keynes wrote, in his Keynes-centric upper-class-focused way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!... Conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.... He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate.... </p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And for those who were not part of the British upper class, it was still the case that the world on the eve of World War I was more prosperous and less inhuman than it had ever been before.</p>
<p>Yet turning this potential, and to a substantial degree actual, progress into a move in the direction of utopia really did require that humanity grow up—and not in the sense of Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” of European proconsuls using the maxim gun to tell everybody what to do. </p>
<p>Rather, it required what Norman Angell wanted to bring into being:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not we who are the “theorists”, if by “theorists” is meant the constructors of elaborate and deceptive theorems in this matter. It is our opponents, the military mystics.... What... makes these fantastic political doctrines possible... are a few false general conceptions... that nations are rival and struggling units, that military force is consequently the determining factor of their relative advantage; that enlargement of political frontiers is the supreme need, and so on. And the revision of these fundamental conceptions will... be the work of individual men. States do not think. It is the men who form the states who think...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Was humanity growing up? In the final analysis, even Rudyard Kipling did not think so. Let us give the mic again to him, writing on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>God of our fathers, known of old/Lord of our far-flung battle-line, <br />
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold/Dominion over palm and pine— <br />
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet/Lest we forget—lest we forget!</p>
<p>The tumult and the shouting dies/The Captains and the Kings depart: <br />
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice/An humble and a contrite heart. <br />
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet/Lest we forget—lest we forget!</p>
<p>Far-called, our navies melt away/On dune and headland sinks the fire: <br />
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! <br />
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet/Lest we forget—lest we forget!</p>
<p>If, drunk with sight of power, we loose/Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, <br />
Such boastings as the Gentiles use/Or lesser breeds without the Law— <br />
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet/Lest we forget—lest we forget!</p>
<p>For heathen heart that puts her trust/In reeking tube and iron shard, <br />
All valiant dust that builds on dust/And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, <br />
For frantic boast and foolish word—Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One task that Kipling is accomplishing in this poem is the reversal of the European/non-European civilization/barbarism trope. In the same way as Joseph Conrad’s protagonist in <em>Heart of Darkness</em> travels up the Congo River into a land that is supposed to be the heart of darkness and yet finds that the true heart of darkness is the heart of European colonizer Kurtz, so the “heathen heart” is he who puts his trust in modern European industrial military technology, and the “lesser breeds without the Law” are German and Russian imperial policymakers who fear God not—and whom Kipling fears that the British policymakers are becoming. Perhaps the best paraphrase of the poem is: We here in Britain have great power; with great power comes great responsibility.</p>
<p>And if the 1870-1914 wave of imperial conquest had not taught everybody that humanity had not grown up, come 1914 the start of World War I would do do the teaching.</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#slouchingtowardsutopia #outtake #economichistory
</code></pre>
#economichistory#slouchingtowardsutopiaJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T11:47:37-07:00Six Migrants and Their Descendants Who Made History: Yet Another Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century, 1870-2016"https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/six-migrants-and-their-descendants-who-made-history-yet-another-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history.html
MOAR DARLINGS MUST DIE!!!!! ---- Six migrants and their descendants who made a lot of our history: 1. One whose move proceeded the great 1870-1914 wave as migration became really cheap—was Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), immigrated to America from Scotland in 1848. He was perhaps the champion of upward mobility: his father was a subsistence-level handloom weaver, and he become the world’s premier steelmaster and perhaps the second richest person in the world. The United States’s openness to those who might become Andrew Carnegies (as long as they came from Europe and not Asia or Africa) and the United States’s standing—then—as an economy of very easy massive upward mobility were key preconditions for the twentieth century to become a truly American Century. 2. Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), who migrated from India to Britain to study at the Inner Temple from 1888-1891 and then to South Africa in 1893, where he stayed for 21 years. Only then did he return to lead the movement to win independence from the British Empire for India. The claim is that he sailed to South Africa thinking of himself as a British Empire citizen first and an Indian second. He returned—impelled both by what he had seen...<p>MOAR DARLINGS MUST DIE!!!!!</p>
<hr />
<p><img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f080038834022ad378f7ac200d-pi" alt="Il Quarto Stato" title="Il_Quarto_Stato.png" border="0" width="749" height="96" /></p>
<p>Six migrants and their descendants who made a lot of our history:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>One whose move proceeded the great 1870-1914 wave as migration became really cheap—was Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), immigrated to America from Scotland in 1848. He was perhaps the champion of upward mobility: his father was a subsistence-level handloom weaver, and he become the world’s premier steelmaster and perhaps the second richest person in the world. The United States’s openness to those who might become Andrew Carnegies (as long as they came from Europe and not Asia or Africa) and the United States’s standing—then—as an economy of very easy massive upward mobility were key preconditions for the twentieth century to become a truly American Century.</p></li>
<li><p>Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), who migrated from India to Britain to study at the Inner Temple from 1888-1891 and then to South Africa in 1893, where he stayed for 21 years. Only then did he return to lead the movement to win independence from the British Empire for India. The claim is that he sailed to South Africa thinking of himself as a British Empire citizen first and an Indian second. He returned—impelled both by what he had seen of gathering apartheid in South Africa and what he had learned about the rights and dignity of humanity in England—convinced that the British Empire must end. And Gandhi was willing to do something about it.</p></li>
<li><p>David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847–1922), who with his wife Anna Lvovna Zhivotovskaya (1850-1910) crossed the the greatest river he had ever seen and moved 200 miles out of the forest and into the grasslands—which had been horse-nomad lands within historical memory—to pioneer one of the richest agriculture soils in the world: it was fifteen miles from his farm in Yanovka to the nearest post office. David and Anna’s fifth child, Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940), called Trotsky, was truly to shake history into a previously inconceivable course.</p></li>
<li><p>Jennie Jerome (1854-1921), who made a reverse migration: from Brooklyn, New York, United States to Westminster, England to marry Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill, becoming engaged in 1873 three days after their first meeting at a sailing regatta on the Isle of Wight. Their marriage was then delayed for seven months while her father Leonard the financier and speculator and his father John Winston the seventh Duke of Marlborough argued over how much money she would bring to the marriage, and how it would be safeguarded. The Duke of Marlborough in the end offered to the couple £1000—5000 then, the equivalent perhaps of —a year; financier-speculator Leonard Jerome in the end offered to the couple £3000—15000 dollars—a year, one third of which would be under Jennie Jerome’s control. The total commitment of £4000 a year back then was the same multiple of average American income per capita as 6,000,000 dollars a year would be today—roughly at the bottom of the richest 2000 couples in America, or the richest 200 in Greater New York, or the richest 100 in Greater San Francisco or Los Angeles.</p></li>
<li><p>Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), who left Croatia and his wished-for parental destiny as a Serbian Orthodox priest to Graz, Austria, Budapest, Paris, and then New York to become the most brilliant electrical engineer ever.</p></li>
<li><p>ixth was Herbert Hoover (1874-1967). Born in 1874 in Iowa, orphaned at 10, in 1885 he started moving west—first to Oregon to live with an uncle; second to California as the first student to attend Stanford University (then free) where he became a mining engineer, graduating in 1895 in the distressed aftermath of the Panic of 1893. His first job was as a mine laborer in Grass Valley at 600 dollars a year, his next as an intern and special assistant to mining engineer Louis Janin at 2400 dollars a year. Then in 1897 he crossed the Pacific to first Australia, working for Bewick, Moreing for 7000 dollars a year, and then China at 20,000 a year and up to make his fortune. From 1901 to 1917 his base was London, as he worked in and managed investments in Australia, China, Russia, Burma, Italy, and Central America in addition to the United States. In 1917 he moved back to America. </p></li>
</ol>
<hr />
<pre><code>#economichistory #slouchingtowardsutopia
</code></pre>
#economichistory#slouchingtowardsutopiaJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T10:53:03-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/japans-trap.html
"A 'period'... could be three years, or it could be 20": **Paul Krugman** (May 1998): _[Japan's Trap](https://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/japtrap.html)_: "The basic premise-that even a zero nominal interest rate is not enough to produce sufficient aggregate demand-is not hypothetical: it is a simple fact about Japan right now. Unless one can make a convincing case that structural reform or fiscal expansion will provide the necessary demand, the only way to expand the economy is to reduce the real interest rate; and the only way to do that is to create expectations of inflation... >...Of course, it is not necessary that Japan do anything. In the quasi-static IS-LM version of the liquidity trap, it appears as if the slump could go on forever. A dynamic analysis makes it clear that it is a temporary phenomenon-in the model it only lasts one period, although the length of a 'period' is unclear (it could be three years, or it could be 20). Even without any policy action, price adjustment or spontaneous structural change will eventually solve the problem. In the long run Japan will work its way out of the trap, whatever the policy response. But on the other hand, in the long run... ---- #noted<p>"A 'period'... could be three years, or it could be 20": <strong>Paul Krugman</strong> (May 1998): <em><a href="https://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/japtrap.html">Japan's Trap</a></em>: "The basic premise-that even a zero nominal interest rate is not enough to produce sufficient aggregate demand-is not hypothetical: it is a simple fact about Japan right now. Unless one can make a convincing case that structural reform or fiscal expansion will provide the necessary demand, the only way to expand the economy is to reduce the real interest rate; and the only way to do that is to create expectations of inflation...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...Of course, it is not necessary that Japan do anything. In the quasi-static IS-LM version of the liquidity trap, it appears as if the slump could go on forever. A dynamic analysis makes it clear that it is a temporary phenomenon-in the model it only lasts one period, although the length of a 'period' is unclear (it could be three years, or it could be 20). Even without any policy action, price adjustment or spontaneous structural change will eventually solve the problem. In the long run Japan will work its way out of the trap, whatever the policy response. But on the other hand, in the long run...</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T09:17:10-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/mainly-macro-how-to-pay-for-the-green-new-deal.html
Wise from Simon: a "Green New Deal" needs to be not just technocratically efficient but politically popular: **Simon Wren-Lewis**: _[How to Pay for the Green New Deal](https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-to-pay-for-green-new-deal.html)_: "Tackling climate change is resisted by powerful political forces that have in the past prevented the appropriate taxes, subsidies and regulations being applied. Which is a major reason why the world has failed to do enough to mitigate climate change.... Just as proponents of a Green New Deal are savvy about the need to overcome the resistance of, for example, the oil and gas industry, they also realise that the Green New Deal needs to be politically popular. So the New Deal package has to include current benefits for the many, perhaps at the expense of the few.... If you cannot make the polluter pay, it is still better to take action to stop climate change even if future generations have to pay the cost of that action... ---- #noted<p>Wise from Simon: a "Green New Deal" needs to be not just technocratically efficient but politically popular: <strong>Simon Wren-Lewis</strong>: <em><a href="https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/02/how-to-pay-for-green-new-deal.html">How to Pay for the Green New Deal</a></em>: "Tackling climate change is resisted by powerful political forces that have in the past prevented the appropriate taxes, subsidies and regulations being applied. Which is a major reason why the world has failed to do enough to mitigate climate change.... Just as proponents of a Green New Deal are savvy about the need to overcome the resistance of, for example, the oil and gas industry, they also realise that the Green New Deal needs to be politically popular. So the New Deal package has to include current benefits for the many, perhaps at the expense of the few.... If you cannot make the polluter pay, it is still better to take action to stop climate change even if future generations have to pay the cost of that action...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T09:11:03-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/eg-democracy-for-republicans.html
**Jacob Levy**: _[Democracy for Republicans](https://niskanencenter.org/?fbclid=IwAR2OHVIfOOoxf1C48z1EKzG6d9z5-4HF-BIx0n-wz1y-hhMgMEh_BI9hvSo#/content/democracy-for-republicans)_: "American conservatism and market liberalism... overlook the deep relationship between democratic government and modern commercial capitalism.... The kind of positive-sum market economy that has transformed the world since 1800 through compounding productivity increases and economic growth is very different from the ancient Rome riven by class conflicts over zero-sum land distribution, but the Founders understood the Roman precedents better than they understood the world that was about to emerge. And that economic world emerged with, not against, the development of a kind of democratic government they also did not foresee, government by contending, permanent political parties alternating in power by competing for votes in a mass-suffrage society... ---- #noted<p><strong>Jacob Levy</strong>: <em><a href="https://niskanencenter.org/?fbclid=IwAR2OHVIfOOoxf1C48z1EKzG6d9z5-4HF-BIx0n-wz1y-hhMgMEh_BI9hvSo#/content/democracy-for-republicans">Democracy for Republicans</a></em>: "American conservatism and market liberalism... overlook the deep relationship between democratic government and modern commercial capitalism.... The kind of positive-sum market economy that has transformed the world since 1800 through compounding productivity increases and economic growth is very different from the ancient Rome riven by class conflicts over zero-sum land distribution, but the Founders understood the Roman precedents better than they understood the world that was about to emerge. And that economic world emerged with, not against, the development of a kind of democratic government they also did not foresee, government by contending, permanent political parties alternating in power by competing for votes in a mass-suffrage society...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T09:09:51-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/hollyzoy-on-twitter-part-of-thread-next-tweet-begins-think-of-this-im-speaking-to-literally-the-most-cop-supportive.html
Excellent insight into police-community relations in America from a very observant and thoughtful peace officer: **Patrick Skinner**: _["One of the questions I ask every class](https://twitter.com/hilzoy/status/1075560104110497792)_: When was the last time you had a positive encounter with a cop who didn’t know you were a cop in which she wasn’t telling you to do something (Traffic) or you weren’t asking something. The answer 100% has been ‘never’. That’s an issue.... I’m speaking to literally the most cop supportive group-other cops-and they can’t think of a positive voluntary encounter with a cop. The problem isn’t our neighbors. It’s us the cops. It doesn’t have to be this way. So, that’s my whole 1 day course kinda.... We need to train cops entirely as if they didn’t have a badge and a gun. And only at the end say ‘by the way, you have this authority, use it as a parachute.’ The badge gets you in the door. The rest is anti-drama. Act accordingly... ---- #noted<p>Excellent insight into police-community relations in America from a very observant and thoughtful peace officer: <strong>Patrick Skinner</strong>: <em><a href="https://twitter.com/hilzoy/status/1075560104110497792">"One of the questions I ask every class</a></em>: When was the last time you had a positive encounter with a cop who didn’t know you were a cop in which she wasn’t telling you to do something (Traffic) or you weren’t asking something. The answer 100% has been ‘never’. That’s an issue.... I’m speaking to literally the most cop supportive group-other cops-and they can’t think of a positive voluntary encounter with a cop. The problem isn’t our neighbors. It’s us the cops. It doesn’t have to be this way. So, that’s my whole 1 day course kinda.... We need to train cops entirely as if they didn’t have a badge and a gun. And only at the end say ‘by the way, you have this authority, use it as a parachute.’ The badge gets you in the door. The rest is anti-drama. Act accordingly...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T09:08:49-07:00Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (March 20, 2019)https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/fairly-recently-must-and-should-reads-and-writings-march-20-2019.html
* _[The Disjunction Between Production and Distribution: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-disjunction-between-production-and-distribution-an-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-l.html)_ * _[Why Was the 20th Century Not a Chinese Century?: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/why-was-the-20th-century-not-a-chinese-century.html)_ * _[Imprisonment by Malthus and "Negative Liberty": An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/imprisonment-by-malthus-and-negative-liberty.html)_ * _[The Dire Absolute Poverty of the Globe in 1870: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-dire-absolute-poverty-of-the-globe-in-1870.html)_ * **Note to Self**: _[South Australia](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/south-australia.html)_ * **DeLong's Morning Coffee**: _[The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-lighting-budget-of-thomas-jefferson-delongs-morning-coffee.html)_ * **Weekend Reading**: _[Mark Bauerlein (2006): On Michael Bérubé](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/mark-bauerlein-2006-on-michael-b%C3%A9rub%C3%A9-weekend-reading.html)_ * **Weekend Reading**: _[ William Freehling: Secessionists at Bay](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/weekend-reading-william-freehling-secessionists-at-bay.html)_: "Monticello... * **Weekend Reading**: _[Garry Wills (1974): Uncle Thomas’s Cabin](https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/weekend-reading-gary-wills-1974-uncle-thomass-cabin.html)_: "It should be clear, by now, what fuels the tremendous industry [Fawn Brodie] poured into her work—her obsession with all the things she can find or invent about Jefferson’s sex life... ---- 1. **Jennifer Jensen Wallach** (2002): _[The Vindication of Fawn Brodie](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25091855.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A5ed7dbb8721fc5a80182d6ed173d6a2d)_: "Julian Bond... articulated the feelings of many black Americans when he said: 'Through all my life, as long as I...<p><img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f080038834022ad38f739e200c-pi" alt="6a00e551f080038834022ad3b05124200d" title="6a00e551f080038834022ad3b05124200d.png" border="0" width="750" /></p>
<ul>
<li><p><em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-disjunction-between-production-and-distribution-an-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-l.html">The Disjunction Between Production and Distribution: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/why-was-the-20th-century-not-a-chinese-century.html">Why Was the 20th Century Not a Chinese Century?: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/imprisonment-by-malthus-and-negative-liberty.html">Imprisonment by Malthus and "Negative Liberty": An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-dire-absolute-poverty-of-the-globe-in-1870.html">The Dire Absolute Poverty of the Globe in 1870: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016"</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Note to Self</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/south-australia.html">South Australia</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><strong>DeLong's Morning Coffee</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-lighting-budget-of-thomas-jefferson-delongs-morning-coffee.html">The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Weekend Reading</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/mark-bauerlein-2006-on-michael-b%C3%A9rub%C3%A9-weekend-reading.html">Mark Bauerlein (2006): On Michael Bérubé</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Weekend Reading</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/weekend-reading-william-freehling-secessionists-at-bay.html"> William Freehling: Secessionists at Bay</a></em>: "Monticello...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Weekend Reading</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/weekend-reading-gary-wills-1974-uncle-thomass-cabin.html">Garry Wills (1974): Uncle Thomas’s Cabin</a></em>: "It should be clear, by now, what fuels the tremendous industry [Fawn Brodie] poured into her work—her obsession with all the things she can find or invent about Jefferson’s sex life...</p></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<ol>
<li><p><strong>Jennifer Jensen Wallach</strong> (2002): <em><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25091855.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A5ed7dbb8721fc5a80182d6ed173d6a2d">The Vindication of Fawn Brodie</a></em>: "Julian Bond... articulated the feelings of many black Americans when he said: 'Through all my life, as long as I have known there was a Thomas Jefferson, I have known there was a Sally Hemings. And I have known, not in a... scholarly way... I know this relationship existed and while, I cannot prove it, I don't find it at all odd that it might have, or could have, or actually did happen. A man who owns slaves is not far away from one who will sleep with his slave.... Brodie noted that: /The unanimity with which Jefferson male biographers deny him even one richly intimate love affair after his wife's death suggests that something is at work here that has little to do with scholarship, especially since they are so gifted in writing about every other aspect of his life'...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Fawn M. Brodie</strong> (1971): <em><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/202448.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A6855e19211798f830087fc477bc83bba">Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization</a></em>: "The women who have written about Jefferson in Paris see neither inhibitions nor 'hangups', nor an absurd preoccupation with the god of reason; they also read the Cosway letters without preconceptions about Jefferson's lack of masculinity.... One could continue, in describing the varied biographical treatment ofJefferson's intimate life, by discussing the ancient, controversial story of Sally Hemings. The documentation is so scattered and complicated, however, that it deserves a small volume in itself, and simply cannot be adequately reported in this essay.... Malone, who finds the story even more abhorrent than does Peterson, devotes a whole appendix in his new volume to a discussion of the evidence. He holds that the father of Sally Hemings's children may have been Peter Carr, but that it was more likely to have been his dissolute brother Samuel. 'It is virtually inconceivable', he writes ofJefferson, 'that this fastidious gentleman whose devotion to his dead wife's memory and to the happiness of his daughters and grandchildren bordered on the excessive could have carried on through a period of years a vulgar liaison which his own family could not have failed to detect'....
The unanimity with which Jefferson male biographers deny him even one richly intimate love affair after his wife's death suggests that something is at work here that has little to do with scholarship, especially since they are so gifted in writing about every other aspect of his life...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>E. M. Halliday</strong> (2001): <em><a href="https://books.google.com/books?isbn=006175546X">Understanding Thomas Jefferson</a></em> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?isbn=006175546X">https://books.google.com/books?isbn=006175546X</a></p></li>
<li><p>The very sharp John Lukacs on what I call "fascism"—proletarian ethnoi that need to fight enemies foreign and domestic with economic cleavages within the ethnoi papered over, rather than proletarian classes that need the economic system unrigged. For some reason he calls it "nationalism", which I think is properly something different: there may well be elective affinity between belief in the nation-state as a political and sociological community and fascism, but it is certainly not an identity: <strong>John Lukacs</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/02/should-read-the-very-sharp-john-lukacs-on-what-i-call-fascismproletarian-_ethnoi_-that-need-to-fight-enemies-foreig.html">The Duel: The Eighty Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler</a></em>: "The principal force of the twentieth century is nationalism...</p></li>
<li><p>Brilliant from my freshman roommate Robert Waldmann: <strong>Robert Waldmann</strong>: <em><a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2019/03/05/the-transformation-of-left-neoliberalism/#comment-745960">The Transformation of Left Neoliberalism</a></em>: " We should want a small state, but the key is a small surface area not a small volume. Shrinking the state by drilling so there are private-sector salients worsens the problem...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>David Brooks</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/opinion/case-for-reparations.html">The Case for Reparations</a></em>: "Sitting, for example, with an elderly black woman in South Carolina shaking in rage because the kids in her neighborhood face greater challenges than she did growing up in 1953...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Brishen Rogers</strong>: <em><a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3327608">Beyond Automation: The Law &amp; Political Economy of Workplace Technological Change</a></em>: "Companies are, however, using new information technologies to exercise power over workers in other ways, all of which are enabled by existing employment laws...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman</strong>: <em><a href="http://origin-flash.sonypictures.com/ist/awards_screenplays/SV_screenplay.pdf">Screenplay: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo</strong> (2007): <em><a href="https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.21.1.141">The Economic Lives of the Poor</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Wikipedia</strong>: <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me">Greek to me</a></em>: "It may have been a direct translation of a similar phrase in Latin: 'Graecum est; non legitur'...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Daniel Davies</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/08/daniel-daviess-one-minute-mba.html">One-Minute MBA</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><strong>David Leonhardt</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/opinion/trump-trade-deficit.html">Trump’s Trade Grade</a></em>: "'He set out to fix a non-problem (a trade deficit) and created real ones including international conflict, higher consumer prices and gross inefficiency'...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>George Magnus</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.prcleader.org/magnus?utm_campaign=765d45e5-2c8f-442c-9a17-c48b64e0396a&amp;utm_source=so">China Leadership Monitor</a></em>: "Before the 1980s and again since 2012, when reforms were suppressed or stifled and inputs were boosted, but without any improvements...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Jonathan Bernstein</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-06/2020-elections-far-left-won-t-take-over-the-democratic-party">2020 Elections: Far Left Won’t Take Over the Democratic Party</a></em>: "It lost five of six presidential elections through 1988. The Democratic Leadership Council of that era was split...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>SF Eater</strong>: <em><a href="https://sf.eater.com/2015/2/6/7990365/ginto-izakaya-japonaise-san-francisco-photos#0">Ginto Izakaya Japonaise</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="https://www.ramenshop.com/">Ramen Shop</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em><a href="http://iyasare-berkeley.com">Iyasare</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><em>*Gregory Travis *</em>: <em><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1249KS8xtIDKb5SxgpeFI6AD-PSC6nFA5/view">737 MAX Article</a></em></p></li>
<li><p><strong>Juliane Stockman</strong>: <em><a href="https://twitter.com/JulianeStockman/status/1106645293645348864">@JulianeStockman</a></em>: "If you haven't subscribed to @tressiemcphd <a href="https://thefirstand15th.substack.com">https://thefirstand15th.substack.com</a>, you need to.... I'm gonna have to journal about this months' essay. Hell, I'm probably gonna take it into therapy to process it. It packs a wallop...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>John Harwood</strong>: <em><a href="https://twitter.com/JohnJHarwood/status/1101836519554404352">@JohnJHarwood</a></em>: "Trump/GOP promised lasting 3+% growth from self-financing tax-cuts. Mainstream economists predicted brief deficit-fueled growth burst...</p></li>
</ol>
<hr />
<ol>
<li><p>For all the Trumpists, language and argument is not an attempt to understand the world and persuade others but rather an attempt to destroy understandings of what is and to dominate others: <strong>Gabriel Schoenfeld</strong>: <em><a href="https://thebulwark.com/trump-supporters-say-the-darndest-things/">Trump Supporters Say the Darndest Things</a></em>: "Readers may not be aware but before Roger Kimball became a fanatical acolyte of Donald Trump, he was a fanatical hater... bitterly complaining of the rallies where Trump 'encouraged a whipped up crowd to extend their right arms in Nazi-like salute while pledging allegiance to the Great Leader'.” Many more such depictions of our 45th president as an aspiring führer can be found in the prolific output of this eminent conservative intellectual.... To judge by his response to my review of Hanson’s book, Kimball seems to have forgotten that he specialized in such Nazi references... right up until the moment he abruptly switched from worrying about the impending Trump Third Reich to hailing Trump for his 'salubrious and morally uplifting' presidency. I don’t believe it is an <em>ad hominem</em> argument to raise questions about the quality of a mind that would produce such extraordinary gyrations...</p></li>
<li><p>One of my hobbyhorses: a "semi-skilled" worker is an unskilled worker with a union: <strong>Kate Bahn</strong> sends us to: <strong>Byron Auguste</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/byronauguste/2019/02/07/low-wage-not-low-skill-why-devaluing-our-workers-matters/#10619731716d">Low Wage, Not Low Skill: Why Devaluing Our Workers Matters</a></em>: "Such jobs require optimizing time tradeoffs, quality control, emotional intelligence and project management. They are not low skill, but they are low wage. Why does this matter? When we stereotype or lazily assume low-wage workers to be “low skill,” it reinforces an often unspoken and pernicious view that they lack intelligence and ambition, maybe even the potential to master “higher-order” skilled work. In an economy that is supposed to operate as a meritocracy—but rarely does—too often, we see low wages and assume both the work and workers are low-value...</p></li>
<li><p>Alan Krueger's suicide is horrible and tragic news. All sympathy to his family. He was a light that shone very brightly for good into many dark corners. זיכרונה לברכה: <strong>Noah Smith</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-03-18/princeton-professor-alan-krueger-led-quiet-economics-revolution">Alan Krueger Led a Quiet Economics Revolution</a></em>: "Nor did Krueger restrict himself to the academy... chief economist at the Department of Labor... assistant Treasury secretary... chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers later in the Obama administration.... Krueger’s work defined what a modern economist should look like. He relentlessly focused on issues of practical, immediate importance. He constantly concerned himself with the betterment of the lives of poor and working people, but refused to naively assume that programs designed to help these people always had the intended effect. He was always aware of relevant economic theories, but never let himself be bound by them. This eclectic, humble, humanistic but practical approach has set the tone for an entire generation of young economists. He was taken from us far too soon, but his impact on economics, and on the world, will last for a very long time to come...</p></li>
<li><p><strong>Benjamin Wittes</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-shorts-speaking-indictments-robert-s-mueller-iii">‘Speaking Indictments’ by Robert S. Mueller III</a></em>: "Bob Mueller has already told a remarkable story. He’s told it scattered through different court filings in a variety of cases, indictments, plea agreements, stipulations of fact. We decided to distill it, to organize it, to put it all in one place, to tell the story of the Russia investigation orally, to let a remarkable group of speakers read the speaking indictments that Mueller has issued. So here’s the story of the Russia conspiracy, distilled to a brief audiobook in seven chapters. What you’re about to hear is all taken nearly verbatim from actual Bob Mueller filings. We’ve cut a lot, moved stuff around, and changed a few words here and there to make it sound more like a narrative. We have changed the meaning not at all...</p></li>
<li><p>I am the view that a surprisingly large chunk of American (and British) political history from 1990-2020 may well turn out in historians' future judgments to revolve around Rupert the Kingmaker, in a role analogous—but in a really weird way—to the role of the Earl of Warwick in the Wars of the Roses. As David Frum once put it: "We thought that Fox News worked for us, but then we learned that we worked for Fox News". Thus the Murdoch succession—the transition from Rupert the Decider to Lachlan the Decider may well be a key moment. Rupert thinks it is a huge joke to boost his fortune by scaring the piss out of his viewers and so glueing their eyeballs to the screen so they can be sold fake diabetes cures and overpriced gold funds. Rupert thinks this is a huge joke even though—or, rather, especially because—it leads to him getting lots of side-eye from his peers. Lachlan is likely to value the side-eye less, if it all, and value being one of the great-and-good in good standing more: <strong>Steve M.</strong>: <em><a href="https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2019/03/is-this-why-fox-suspended-jeanine-pirro.html">Is This Why Fox Suspended Jeanine Pirro?</a></em>: "I don't believe there'll really be major changes at Fox. I think the hope is that small, insignificant steps will bamboozle investors and advertisers. But we'll see...</p></li>
<li><p>"The... value of names... was changed into arbitrary.... Inconsiderate boldness, was counted true–hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour. To re–advise for the better security, was held for a fair pretext of tergiversation. He that was fierce, was always trusty; and he that contraried such a one, was suspected. He that did insidiate, if it took, was a wise man; but he that could smell out a trap laid, a more dangerous man than he. But he that had been so provident as not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary. In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant it, was commended.... To be revenged was in more request than never to have received injury. And for oaths (when any were) of reconcilement, being administered in the present for necessity, were of force to such as had otherwise no power; but upon opportunity, he that first durst thought his revenge sweeter by the trust, than if he had taken the open way. For they did not only put to account the safeness of that course, but having circumvented their adversary by fraud, assumed to themselves withal a mastery in point of wit. And dishonest men for the most part are sooner called able, than simple men honest: and men are ashamed of this title, but take a pride in the other...": <strong>Neville Morley</strong>: <em><a href="https://thesphinxblog.com/2019/03/20/lawful-neutral/">Lawful Neutral?</a></em>: "Victor Davis Hanson, and the use of ‘consensual’ to describe attempts at doing without the active consent of the governed is a neat trick.... Hanson['s]... first chapter explicitly presents The Two Americas as an echo of Athens v Sparta, sophisticated coastal elites versus rough unlettered rural folk, with the majority of Greek <em>poleis</em> rooting for the later. Hanson presents himself as the detached observer, who lives among the real people of the countryside on his ancestral estate but knows his way around the world of the city–and so his choice to side with the ‘Spartans’ is based on full knowledge and understanding of both sides, not the ignorance of knowing no other way of life (a fault of the clever Californian and Beltway elites as well).... His depiction of a divided America is Thucydidean not only in its chosen tropes but in authorial self-conception: he... recognises, even as he recoils from... the charisma and power of a Cleon, despising and desiring at the same time his rough anti-aristocratic manliness; Cleon’s methods are not those of Thucydides’ class, but they promise to have the desired effect on the corrupt status quo, simultaneously too democratic and anti-populist. This Thucydides is Chaotic Evil: dedicated (even if just as cheer-leader) to... the triumph of individualism and naked self-interest.... As Thucydides described and this modern Thucydides exemplifies, every action is praiseworthy insofar as it benefits one’s own faction and hurts the enemy, and reckless vulgarity and self-interest are redefined as the traits of an off-putting Homeric hero...</p></li>
</ol>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted #weblogs
</code></pre>
#noted#weblogsJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T09:07:03-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-value-of-names-was-changed-into-arbitrary-inconsiderate-boldness-was-counted-truehearted-manliness-provid.html
"The... value of names... was changed into arbitrary.... Inconsiderate boldness, was counted true–hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour. To re–advise for the better security, was held for a fair pretext of tergiversation. He that was fierce, was always trusty; and he that contraried such a one, was suspected. He that did insidiate, if it took, was a wise man; but he that could smell out a trap laid, a more dangerous man than he. But he that had been so provident as not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary. "In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant it, was commended.... To be revenged was in more request than never to have received injury. And for oaths (when any were) of reconcilement, being administered in the present for necessity, were of force to such as had otherwise no power;...<p>"The... value of names... was changed into arbitrary.... Inconsiderate boldness, was counted true–hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be wise in every thing, to be lazy in every thing. A furious suddenness was reputed a point of valour. To re–advise for the better security, was held for a fair pretext of tergiversation. He that was fierce, was always trusty; and he that contraried such a one, was suspected. He that did insidiate, if it took, was a wise man; but he that could smell out a trap laid, a more dangerous man than he. But he that had been so provident as not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary. </p>
<p>"In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant it, was commended.... To be revenged was in more request than never to have received injury. And for oaths (when any were) of reconcilement, being administered in the present for necessity, were of force to such as had otherwise no power; but upon opportunity, he that first durst thought his revenge sweeter by the trust, than if he had taken the open way. For they did not only put to account the safeness of that course, but having circumvented their adversary by fraud, assumed to themselves withal a mastery in point of wit. And dishonest men for the most part are sooner called able, than simple men honest: and men are ashamed of this title, but take a pride in the other...":</p>
<p><strong>Neville Morley</strong>: <em><a href="https://thesphinxblog.com/2019/03/20/lawful-neutral/">Lawful Neutral?</a></em>: "Victor Davis Hanson, and the use of ‘consensual’ to describe attempts at doing without the active consent of the governed is a neat trick.... Hanson['s]... first chapter explicitly presents The Two Americas as an echo of Athens v Sparta, sophisticated coastal elites versus rough unlettered rural folk, with the majority of Greek <em>poleis</em> rooting for the later. Hanson presents himself as the detached observer, who lives among the real people of the countryside on his ancestral estate but knows his way around the world of the city–and so his choice to side with the ‘Spartans’ is based on full knowledge and understanding of both sides, not the ignorance of knowing no other way of life (a fault of the clever Californian and Beltway elites as well).... His depiction of a divided America is Thucydidean not only in its chosen tropes but in authorial self-conception: he... recognises, even as he recoils from... the charisma and power of a Cleon, despising and desiring at the same time his rough anti-aristocratic manliness; Cleon’s methods are not those of Thucydides’ class, but they promise to have the desired effect on the corrupt status quo, simultaneously too democratic and anti-populist. This Thucydides is Chaotic Evil: dedicated (even if just as cheer-leader) to... the triumph of individualism and naked self-interest.... As Thucydides described and this modern Thucydides exemplifies, every action is praiseworthy insofar as it benefits one’s own faction and hurts the enemy, and reckless vulgarity and self-interest are redefined as the traits of an off-putting Homeric hero...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T08:41:25-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/no-more-mister-nice-blog-is-this-why-fox-suspended-jeanine-pirro.html
I am of the view that a surprisingly large chunk of American (and British) political history from 1990-2020 may well turn out in historians' future judgments to revolve around Rupert the Kingmaker, in a role analogous—but in a really weird way—to the role of the Earl of Warwick in the Wars of the Roses. As David Frum once put it: "We thought that Fox News worked for us, but then we learned that we worked for Fox News". Thus the Murdoch succession—the transition from Rupert the Decider to Lachlan the Decider may well be a key moment. Rupert thinks it is a huge joke to boost his fortune by scaring the piss out of his viewers and so glueing their eyeballs to the screen so they can be sold fake diabetes cures and overpriced gold funds. Rupert thinks this is a huge joke even though—or, rather, especially because—it leads to him getting lots of side-eye from his peers. Lachlan is likely to value the side-eye less, if it all, and value being one of the great-and-good in good standing more: **Steve M.**: _[Is This Why Fox Suspended Jeanine Pirro?](https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2019/03/is-this-why-fox-suspended-jeanine-pirro.html)_: "I don't believe there'll really be major changes at Fox. I...<p>I am of the view that a surprisingly large chunk of American (and British) political history from 1990-2020 may well turn out in historians' future judgments to revolve around Rupert the Kingmaker, in a role analogous—but in a really weird way—to the role of the Earl of Warwick in the Wars of the Roses. </p>
<p>As David Frum once put it: "We thought that Fox News worked for us, but then we learned that we worked for Fox News". </p>
<p>Thus the Murdoch succession—the transition from Rupert the Decider to Lachlan the Decider may well be a key moment. Rupert thinks it is a huge joke to boost his fortune by scaring the piss out of his viewers and so glueing their eyeballs to the screen so they can be sold fake diabetes cures and overpriced gold funds. Rupert thinks this is a huge joke even though—or, rather, especially because—it leads to him getting lots of side-eye from his peers. </p>
<p>Lachlan is likely to value the side-eye less, if it all, and value being one of the great-and-good in good standing more: <strong>Steve M.</strong>: <em><a href="https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2019/03/is-this-why-fox-suspended-jeanine-pirro.html">Is This Why Fox Suspended Jeanine Pirro?</a></em>: "I don't believe there'll really be major changes at Fox. I think the hope is that small, insignificant steps will bamboozle investors and advertisers. But we'll see...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-20T08:16:40-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-lawfare-podcast-shorts-speaking-indictments-by-robert-s-mueller-iii-lawfare.html
**Benjamin Wittes**: _[‘Speaking Indictments’ by Robert S. Mueller III](https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-shorts-speaking-indictments-robert-s-mueller-iii)_: "Bob Mueller has already told a remarkable story. He’s told it scattered through different court filings in a variety of cases, indictments, plea agreements, stipulations of fact. We decided to distill it, to organize it, to put it all in one place, to tell the story of the Russia investigation orally, to let a remarkable group of speakers read the speaking indictments that Mueller has issued. So here’s the story of the Russia conspiracy, distilled to a brief audiobook in seven chapters. What you’re about to hear is all taken nearly verbatim from actual Bob Mueller filings. We’ve cut a lot, moved stuff around, and changed a few words here and there to make it sound more like a narrative. We have changed the meaning not at all... ---- #noted<p><strong>Benjamin Wittes</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-shorts-speaking-indictments-robert-s-mueller-iii">‘Speaking Indictments’ by Robert S. Mueller III</a></em>: "Bob Mueller has already told a remarkable story. He’s told it scattered through different court filings in a variety of cases, indictments, plea agreements, stipulations of fact. We decided to distill it, to organize it, to put it all in one place, to tell the story of the Russia investigation orally, to let a remarkable group of speakers read the speaking indictments that Mueller has issued. So here’s the story of the Russia conspiracy, distilled to a brief audiobook in seven chapters. What you’re about to hear is all taken nearly verbatim from actual Bob Mueller filings. We’ve cut a lot, moved stuff around, and changed a few words here and there to make it sound more like a narrative. We have changed the meaning not at all...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-19T18:32:28-07:00The Disjunction Between Production and Distribution: An Outtake from "Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century 1870-2016https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-disjunction-between-production-and-distribution-an-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-l.html
KILLING YET MORE OF MY DARLINGS! (sob!) ---- In the world as it stood in 1870–and even more so in 1914—there was a huge disjunction between the growing effective economic power of the human race and the proper distribution of this potential wealth. Science, technology, and organization were clearly wreaking miracles. The rewards, however, were not going to the scientists and the engineers and the workers, but to the landlords and the financiers and to the organizer-entrepreneurs. The sociological contribution of this latter group in creating organizations and setting them in motion was mighty. Best friends Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels probably put it best in 1848: >The business class, during… scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to [hu]man[ity], machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?… However, the benefits of greater human power to harvest fruits from nature and organize persons did not trickle down. There...<p><img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f080038834022ad378f7ac200d-pi" alt="Il Quarto Stato" title="Il_Quarto_Stato.png" border="0" width="749" height="96" /></p>
<p>KILLING YET MORE OF MY DARLINGS! (sob!)</p>
<hr />
<p>In the world as it stood in 1870–and even more so in 1914—there was a huge disjunction between the growing effective economic power of the human race and the proper distribution of this potential wealth. Science, technology, and organization were clearly wreaking miracles. The rewards, however, were not going to the scientists and the engineers and the workers, but to the landlords and the financiers and to the organizer-entrepreneurs. The sociological contribution of this latter group in creating organizations and setting them in motion was mighty. Best friends Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels probably put it best in 1848:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The business class, during… scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to [hu]man[ity], machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, the benefits of greater human power to harvest fruits from nature and organize persons did not trickle down. There were, broadly speaking, as of 1870 three views about why it did not trickle down; and about what, if anything, ought to be done about it:</p>
<p>First, we have already noted John Stuart Mill’s view: The problem was a Malthusian one—people, especially “the unproductive”, had too much freedom to have children and to draw on the public for support. The solution was to “the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight…” with workers’ prisons for those bankrupt and broke: “support… accompanied with… restraints on their freedom... restricted indulgence, and enforced rigidity of discipline…”</p>
<p>Opposed to this was Karl Marx’s view: that human liberation understood in a German-style idealist philosophical mode would inevitably be attained in the broadly prosperous society made possible by technology after that society had been developed by being run on British-style classical-political economy Ricardian-socialist lines and had then been transformed by a French-style political revolutionary overthrow of the old régime. What would produce the revolution? Aroused and self-organized humanity outraged by the enormous disjunction between the tremendous wealth of society and the increasing poverty of the typical worker:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The forest of outstretched arms begging for work grows ever thicker and thicker, while the arms themselves grow ever leaner and leaner…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And this would, Marx believed, inevitably trigger a political-societal reaction:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Further socialisation of labour… takes a new form…. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this… develop… the cooperative… labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common…. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital… grows… misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class… disciplined, united, organised by… capitalist production itself…. Centralisation of capital and socialisation of labour… become incompatible with their capitalist exterior shell. This shell is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There was a third view, however: the view that there was nothing wrong with human society as it stood toward the end of the 19th century. This was the view of, say, Herbert Spencer and his <em>Social Statics</em>—that what appeared to be the defects of society has it then stood were actually necessary forms of social discipline in order to guide the upward evolution of the human race. Andrew Carnegie—by then no longer the hungry child of a penniless handloom weaver but a plutocratic steelmaster—put it in a nutshell in 1889:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What were… luxuries have become… necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the landlord had…. The landlord has books and pictures rarer, and appointments more artistic, than the King could then obtain. The price we pay for this… is, no doubt, great…. The employer of thousands is forced into the strictest economies… [in] the rates paid to labor… friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor…. The law of competition… is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The theorists of the 18th Century Enlightenment had rejected justifications of inequality based on right derived from the inheritance of caste—fictionalized descent from the Norman knights who had conquered England for William the Bastard in 1066, or fictionalized descent from the Frankish warriors who had conquered Gaul for King Clovis the supposed grandson of Merovech—for the equality of all before the law, and careers open to the talented. But they held the line at what one had gained via one's own hands and one's own talents in the societal system in which one was embedded: that one had a clear right to. 19th Century utilitarians abandoned that: they had argued that the distribution of even property should be calculated by a benevolent government so as to produce the maximum sum of utility—achieve the greatest good of the greatest number—and that one had no rights that contravened that principle. Along with diminishing marginal utility of wealth, that utilitiarian principle entails the sharp rejection the idea that property rights and equality under the law were in any sense sacred, inasmuch as “the majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread…” </p>
<p>But then the pendulum swung back again. </p>
<p>The social darwinists came up with new justifications of inequality, based on privation and poverty as Lamarckian and Darwinian sorting mechanisms that were necessary to drive the upward evolution of the human race. Hence all was in fact for the best in this the best of all possible worlds—and the more it appeared in the surface to be not the best, the more it was.</p>
<p>Few social darwinists indeed were ever willing to take their logic to the end of the streetcar line. Few were willing to conclude that although the privation of the fit poor was useful as spurring them to self improvement and enterprise and the privation of the unfit poor was useful as improving the Race, the luxury and the dissipation of the rich were not useful. Andrew Carnegie was willing to ride to the end of the streetcar line: once one had demonstrated one’s fitness by becoming rich the only appropriate use of wealth was to give it away to advance the public good rather than to either consume it or bequeath it, for “he who dies rich dies disgraced”. </p>
<p>For most of the rich, however, the justifications were another cycle in the ideological justification that those who are rich should hold what they have: what John Kenneth Galbraith described as “the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness”. </p>
<p>The contest between these three views—and diluted and blended variants of them—is a principal part of the history of political economy and economic policy. Marx’s belief that History would bring a superior social system and allow the productivity made possible by the advance of knowledge and investment to be distributed to create a truly human world is no longer credible. Mill’s fear that humanity would be unable to organize itself to master its destiny because of resource scarcity proved false with respect to population, but may prove true with respect to energy use and global warming. And there are still many—or at least a few with very loud voices—who hold that if the world of today has a problem, it is that distribution is not unequal enough.</p>
<hr />
<hr />
<p><strong>the business class</strong>: This is in French in the German original: “bourgeoisie” and “bourgeoisie”. These words are invariably but not too usefully left translated in English editions. Marx and Engels did not have a great German word for the concept. Originally—most prominently in his essay “On the Jewish Question”—Marx followed his then-friends Moses Hess and Heinrich Heine in labeling this as “Jewishness”. (Cf., Heinrich Heine’s denunciation of his own city of Hamburg as a city of hagglers populated entirely by Jews: “baptized and un-baptized Jews (I call all Hamburg’s inhabitants Jews)”.) Jonathan Sperber (2013): <em>Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life</em> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0871403544">https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0871403544</a> (p. 133). That was unfortunate. Marx and Engels attributed a heroic and Promethean as well as a degrading and destructive historical role to this class.</p>
<p><strong>lap of social labor</strong>: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848): Manifesto of the Communist Party <a href="https://books.google.com/books?isbn=9387944204">https://books.google.com/books?isbn=9387944204</a></p>
<p><strong>restricted indulgence, and enforced rigidity of discipline</strong>: John Stuart Mill (1871): Principles of Political Economy </p>
<p><strong>Karl Marx’s view</strong>: The view of Marx-the-intellectual-thinker, not of Marxism-the-revealed-creed. The best very short summary of what Marx thought and why is—I think—mine: J. Bradford DeLong (2009): Understanding Karl Marx <a href="http://delong.typepad.com/20090420_stanford-talk_karl-marx.pdf">http://delong.typepad.com/20090420_stanford-talk_karl-marx.pdf</a>. The best biography of Karl-Marx-the-person—a very different animal from Karl-Marx-the-idol—is, I think, Jonathan Sperber (2013): Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (New York: W.W. Norton: 0871404672) <a href="http://books.google.com/books/?isbn=0871404672">http://books.google.com/books/?isbn=0871404672</a></p>
<p><strong>ever leaner and leaner</strong>: Karl Marx (1847): <em>Wage Labour and Capital</em> <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/">https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/</a></p>
<p><strong>expropriators are expropriated</strong>: Karl Marx (1867): <em>Capital</em> <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/">https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/</a></p>
<p><strong>Herbert Spencer and his <em>Social Statics</em></strong>: Herbert Spencer (1851): <em>Social Statics: Or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed</em> (London: John Chapman) <a href="https://books.google.com/books/id=ph4RAAAAYAAJ">https://books.google.com/books/id=ph4RAAAAYAAJ</a></p>
<p><strong>insures the survival of the fittest in every department</strong>: Andrew Carnegie (1889): “Wealth”, <em>North American Review</em> 391 (June) <a href="http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/02/andrew-carnegie-1889-wealth-an-historical-document.html">http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/02/andrew-carnegie-1889-wealth-an-historical-document.html</a></p>
<p><strong>the majestic equality of the law</strong>: Anatole France (1894): The Red Lily (London: J. Lane) <a href="https://books.google.com/books/?id=2-YLAAAAIAAJ">https://books.google.com/books/?id=2-YLAAAAIAAJ</a></p>
<p><strong>this the best of all possible worlds</strong> Voltaire (1759): Candide, or, All for the Best (Paris: Lambert) <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19942/19942-h/19942-h.htm">https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19942/19942-h/19942-h.htm</a></p>
<p><strong>a superior moral justification for selfishness</strong>: John Kenneth Galbraith (2002): Interview with Rupert Cornwell: Stop the Madness, <em>Toronto Globe and Mail</em> (July 6) <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith">https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith</a>. As quoted by Daniel Davies (2003): Hypocrisy as a Virtue <a href="https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/the-financial-times-says-daniel-davies-told-us-so.html">https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/the-financial-times-says-daniel-davies-told-us-so.html</a></p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#slouchingtowardsutopia #outtake #highlighted
</code></pre>
<h6>This File: <a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-disjunction-between-production-and-distribution-an-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-l.html">https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/the-disjunction-between-production-and-distribution-an-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-l.html</a></h6>
<h6>Edit This File: <a href="https://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/post/6a00e551f0800388340240a448348a200c/edit">https://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/post/6a00e551f0800388340240a448348a200c/edit</a></h6>
#highlighted#slouchingtowardsutopiaJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-19T10:25:52-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/racial-equality-is-economic-equality.html
Save for white baby-boomers and pre-baby boomers who rode the post-WWII wave of government-sponsored housing finance and inflation on the one hand and union and white-collar defined-benefit pensions on the other, by and large the "middle class" in terms of wealth has always been a multi-generational phenomenon: what with keeping-up-with-the-joneses and the slings-and-arrows-of-fortune, several generations of secure middle-class incomes are required to build up anything that can be called a middle-class wealth stock. And racial discrimination has made it impossible for African-Americans to have such a run of security: **Darrick Hamilton**: _[Racial Equality Is Economic Equality](https://bidenforum.org/racial-equality-is-economic-equality-64fca8e8bfc0)_: "Race is a stronger predictor of wealth than class itself. The 2017 Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that the typical black family has about $17,600 in wealth (inclusive of home equity); in contrast, the typical white family has about $171,000. This amounts to an absolute racial wealth gap where the typical black family owns only ten cents for every dollar owned by the typical white family!... >...This disparity has endured over time. The racial wealth gap is an inheritance that began with chattel slavery, when blacks were literally the capital assets for a white landowning plantation class. The gap continued after Emancipation, when discriminatory...<p>Save for white baby-boomers and pre-baby boomers who rode the post-WWII wave of government-sponsored housing finance and inflation on the one hand and union and white-collar defined-benefit pensions on the other, by and large the "middle class" in terms of wealth has always been a multi-generational phenomenon: what with keeping-up-with-the-joneses and the slings-and-arrows-of-fortune, several generations of secure middle-class incomes are required to build up anything that can be called a middle-class wealth stock. </p>
<p>And racial discrimination has made it impossible for African-Americans to have such a run of security: </p>
<p><strong>Darrick Hamilton</strong>: <em><a href="https://bidenforum.org/racial-equality-is-economic-equality-64fca8e8bfc0">Racial Equality Is Economic Equality</a></em>: "Race is a stronger predictor of wealth than class itself. The 2017 Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that the typical black family has about $17,600 in wealth (inclusive of home equity); in contrast, the typical white family has about $171,000. This amounts to an absolute racial wealth gap where the typical black family owns only ten cents for every dollar owned by the typical white family!...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...This disparity has endured over time. The racial wealth gap is an inheritance that began with chattel slavery, when blacks were literally the capital assets for a white landowning plantation class. The gap continued after Emancipation, when discriminatory laws and institutions established insurmountable barriers to the American middle class for black families. Today, hundreds of years removed from chattel slavery, there has virtually never been a substantive black middle class when defined by wealth. In contrast, the implementation of FDR’s New Deal and post-war vision facilitated an asset-based white middle class to cumulatively build wealth and pass it on to their heirs...</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-19T09:58:52-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/erik-tarloff-reads-from-the-woman-in-black-march-19-7-pm-1491-shattuck-ave.html
Be there or be square: **Erik Tarloff**: _[The Woman in Black](http://www.eriktarloff.com/the-woman-in-black-appearances-and-book-signings/)_ : Reading: March 19, 2019, Book Inc, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA, 7 PM ---- #noted<p><img src="https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f0800388340240a47116b7200d-pi" alt="Content" title="content.jpeg" border="0" width="127" height="206" style="float:right;" /></p>
<p>Be there or be square: <strong>Erik Tarloff</strong>: <em><a href="http://www.eriktarloff.com/the-woman-in-black-appearances-and-book-signings/">The Woman in Black</a></em> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1947856979">https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1947856979</a>: Reading: March 19, 2019, Book Inc, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA, 7 PM</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-18T19:39:59-07:00https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/alan-krueger-led-a-quiet-economics-revolution.html
Alan Krueger's suicide is horrible and tragic news. All sympathy to his family. He was a light that shone very brightly for good into many dark corners. זיכרונה לברכה: **Noah Smith**: _[Alan Krueger Led a Quiet Economics Revolution](https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-03-18/princeton-professor-alan-krueger-led-quiet-economics-revolution)_: "Nor did Krueger restrict himself to the academy... chief economist at the Department of Labor... assistant Treasury secretary... chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers later in the Obama administration.... Krueger’s work defined what a modern economist should look like. He relentlessly focused on issues of practical, immediate importance. He constantly concerned himself with the betterment of the lives of poor and working people, but refused to naively assume that programs designed to help these people always had the intended effect. He was always aware of relevant economic theories, but never let himself be bound by them. This eclectic, humble, humanistic but practical approach has set the tone for an entire generation of young economists. He was taken from us far too soon, but his impact on economics, and on the world, will last for a very long time to come... ---- #noted<p>Alan Krueger's suicide is horrible and tragic news. All sympathy to his family. He was a light that shone very brightly for good into many dark corners. זיכרונה לברכה: <strong>Noah Smith</strong>: <em><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-03-18/princeton-professor-alan-krueger-led-quiet-economics-revolution">Alan Krueger Led a Quiet Economics Revolution</a></em>: "Nor did Krueger restrict himself to the academy... chief economist at the Department of Labor... assistant Treasury secretary... chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers later in the Obama administration.... Krueger’s work defined what a modern economist should look like. He relentlessly focused on issues of practical, immediate importance. He constantly concerned himself with the betterment of the lives of poor and working people, but refused to naively assume that programs designed to help these people always had the intended effect. He was always aware of relevant economic theories, but never let himself be bound by them. This eclectic, humble, humanistic but practical approach has set the tone for an entire generation of young economists. He was taken from us far too soon, but his impact on economics, and on the world, will last for a very long time to come...</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#noted
</code></pre>
#notedJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-18T18:05:22-07:00Why Was the 20th Century Not a Chinese Century?https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/why-was-the-20th-century-not-a-chinese-century.html
10000 words on why the 20th Century was not a Chinese century. Very few of these belong in a 20th Century history book, alas... ---- Kong Shangren (1699): >White glass from across the Western Seas Is ...<p><img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://delong.typepad.com/.a/6a00e551f080038834022ad35ce96e200c-pi" alt="15000px Along the River 7 119 3 jpg 15 000×463 pixels" title="15000px-Along_the_River_7-119-3_jpg_15_000×463_pixels.png" border="0" width="750" /></p>
<p>10000 words on why the 20th Century was not a Chinese century. Very few of these belong in a 20th Century history book, alas...</p>
<p><a href="https://www.icloud.com/pages/0pebTWadZO0frIs90_JSUKMnw">https://www.icloud.com/pages/0pebTWadZO0frIs90_JSUKMnw</a></p>
<hr />
<p>Kong Shangren (1699):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>White glass from across the Western Seas <br />
Is imported through Macao: <br />
Fashioned into lenses big as coins, <br />
They encompass the eyes in a double frame. <br />
I put them on—it suddenly becomes clear; <br />
I can see the very tips of things! <br />
And read fine print by the dim-lit window <br />
Just like in my youth…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The most interesting thing was not that the world was poor in 1870: the world had always been poor since the invention of agriculture. The interesting things were that a part of the world was just starting to become rich—and it was interesting which part was becoming rich. That part of the world was starting to become rich was odd. And that the technological and organizational edge of human civilization in 1870 was the North Atlantic rather than, say, China was distinctly odd.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>1: Britons: Too Ignorant to Make Good Slaves</strong></p>
<p>Two thousand years before 1870, people would have laughed at the idea at Britain as a leading economic power.</p>
<p>The first-century BCE Roman military-politician Gaius Julius Caesar thought that the Britons as among the most backward people he had ever conquered. When Marcus Tullius Cicero learned that Caesar was planning to invade Britain, his reaction was to snark to his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus. Caesar’s invasion of Britain was completely pointless. Not an ounce of silver that could be stolen was to be found on the entire island. All that a Roman politician on the make could gain from an invasion of Britain was slaves—and not very good-quality slaves at that. Certainly nobody could expect from the Britons even a single slave smart and well-educated enough to have a useful skill like literacy or musicianship!</p>
<p>A thousand years before the 19th Century—in 800, say—the technological and civilizational cutting edges of humanity were to be found in the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid’s capital of Baghdad and the Tang Dynasty’s Chang’an rather than London or Bristol or Manchester or New York or Washington or Cleveland. Even three-hundred years before—in 1570—it would have taken a very sharp-eyed observer indeed to believe that northwest Europe was about to get its act together in a way that the Turkish Ottoman civilization around Constantinople, the Moghul Indian civilization around Delhi, and the Ming Chinese civilization around Beijing could not.</p>
<p>That the 20th Century was not a Chinese century was distinctly odd in the context of world history. For three millennia the overwhelming proportion of centuries had been primarily or at least secondarily “Chinese centuries”. Those who did not feel that China was in some senses a civilization to be emulated thus betrayed their ignorance. But by 1870 this was no longer the case.</p>
<p>By 1870, however, the power and technology gradients across world civilizations were very clear. Real wages in England in 1870 were beginning to be substantially higher than past averages from the Middle Ages. Real wages in China and India remained extremely low by any standard. Travelers from western Europe to Asia in the 1600s and before had been impressed back then not just by the scale of the empires and the luxurious wealth of their rulers but by the rest of the economy as well. The scale of operations, the prosperity and industry of the merchant classes, the good order of the people, and the absence of extraordinary poverty among the masses frequently struck European observers as worthy of comment as striking contrasts with back home. But by the 1800s this was no longer true. Travelers’ reports then focused as much on mass poverty and near-starvation as on high-craft and high-culture luxury. Assessments of the wealth of the court took on a sinister “orientalist” cast—a cruel corrupt ruling elite that simply did not care about the welfare of the people—when viewed against the background of the poverty of the masses.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>2: What Had Happened to China?</strong></p>
<p>The coming of the technology gradient favoring western Europe was indeed remarkably late. Before 1800 or so there was very little that European traders could offer to sell that Chinese consumers would wish to buy. For more than two thousand years China had been one of the leading, if not the leading civilization on the planet. It was not that the average standard of living was higher in China: Malthusian population pressures roughly equalized standards of living around the world. But China had a higher population density because more efficient technologies allowed a given plot of arable land to generate more food, better craftswork in most industries, a larger class of literati interested in high culture, and—quite probably—a higher standard of living for the landed and ruling elite.</p>
<p>Before 1800 European trade for Chinese goods was by and large trade of silver for China-made luxuries. And the transfer of technology flowed from east to west: it is still unclear to what degree the European development of items like gunpowder, printing, the compass, and noodles owed to the Chinese example. It is clear that all of these were known in China before they were known in Europe.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>3: China’s Relative Apogee</strong></p>
<p>In the Tang Dynasty years before and the Sung Dynasty years after the year 1000, China had been the most progressive and innovative civilization in the world: innovative technologically, organizationally, and militarily. Its population—60 million? 80 million? 100 million?—was one of the most rapidly growing and best-fed populations in the world, thanks to the development of strains of rice that could be wet-planted, irrigated, and produce three crops a year in the fertile soil of China from the Yangtze basin south. China then led the world in non-agricultural technologies as well. At the start of the seventeenth century the British savant, politician, and bureaucrat Francis Bacon had marveled at three inventions that he said had utterly transformed Europe: gunpowder, printing, and the compass. China had developed all three, and had developed all three before 1000.</p>
<p>China in the twelfth century at its pre-industrial relative apogee produced more iron and saw a greater share of agricultural production sold on markets than Britain would produce and market in the eighteenth. Zheng He's mid-fifteenth century voyages of exploration sailed four times as far with twenty times as many sailors as Columbus, and could land ten times as many soldiers at Dar es Salaam and Trincomalee as Cortez would land at Vera Cruz. China had long had the capability of launching its own “voyages of discovery.” Its governments had chosen not to, with that one exception. Zheng He’s fleet reached Zanzibar, and touched Africa, bringing back a giraffe. Annoyed at their treatment by a Sri Lankan king, they captured him and brought him back to China to make his apology to the emperor. But the political balance in the Ming court changed, the follow-up expeditions were cancelled, and the exploration program abandoned.</p>
<p>Trade between China and the rest of Eurasia was overwhelmingly one-way. Places from India west wanted silks, porcelains, teas, and the other valuable and lightweight products of the craftworkers of China’s high civilization. In return, China wanted… silver. Demand for curiosities aside, nothing made in the countries to China’s east were worth the cost of carrying them to China for what they could be sold there.</p>
<p>China led the world in political organization as well. The four greatest—by some average of size and durability—empires of all history were, fourth, the johnny-come-lately seaborne empire of the British; third, the Persian produced by the lucky adjacency of the horse-and-rider country of the Iranian plateau and the agricultural boomland of the Tigris-Euphrates valley; second, the Roman trans-Mediterranean; and first, the Chinese. Both the Roman and Chinese were launched more than 2000 years ago. Both fell apart after 650 and 450 years, respectively. In the case of Rome, the memory and the goal of empire and the name of the founder echoed down through history, so that even in 1917 George V Windsor called himself “Caesar of India” (Kaiser-i-Hind), Nikolai II Romanov called himself “Caesar of All the Russias” (Tsar' Vsekh Rosiy), Wilhelm II Hohenzollern called himself “German Caesar” (Deutscher Kaiser), Karl I Habsburg called himself “Kaiser von Österreich” (Caesar of Austria) and Mehmed VI called himself “Kaisar-i-Rum” (Caesar of Rome). But nothing like the empire was ever reestablished.</p>
<p>Not so in China. The memory of the Chin-Han empire drove its reestablishment by the Tang (618-907), the Sung (960-1127 or -1279), the Yuan (1206- or 1279-1368), the Ming (1368-1644), and, last, the Qing (1644-1912). No other ruler's writ ran a third as far or had even a third as large a chance of being obeyed as that of China's emperor. Tang Dynasty cavalry had skirmished with Persians on the shores of the Aral Sea. The Sung Dynasty river navy was the only military force to even temporarily stymie Ghengis Khan's Mongols before his descendants took to fighting each other rather than expanding the empire. No pre-industrial central government anywhere ever managed to match the reach, extent, and power of the landlord-scholar-bureaucracy mode of domination invented under the Tang and developed under the Sung. The Sung Dynasty capital, Hangzhou, was before the Mongol conquest the largest city in the world—larger than Baghdad or Constantinople or Cordova or Delhi—with perhaps half a million inhabitants: the closest thing to an economic, cultural, and political capital the twelfth-century world had.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>4: China’s Post-Sung Relative Stagnation</strong></p>
<p>By the second half of the nineteenth century China’s relative apogee was three-quarters of a millennium past, and the government and the people were in crisis. The people were in crisis because they were more than three times as numerous as their predecessors at the pre-industrial apogee, because they were ruled by a rapacious landed aristocracy, and because progress in agriculture and industry to counterbalance rising population had been nearly absent for most of the second millennium. In 1100 the Chinese people were rich, or at least as rich as pre-industrial peasant societies get. At the start of the second millennium development of new types of crops and new strains of rice had greatly boosted agricultural productivity and triggered the centuries-long spread of China’s heartland from the Yellow River to the Yangtze and further south, to Hunan and Guangzhou.</p>
<p>And by the second half of the nineteenth century Malthus was having his revenge. China had filled up, with more than 300 million people, which left average farm sizes less than a third of what they had been three quarters of a millennium before. The bulk of peasant families were close to the edge. It is virtually certain that the average Chinese peasant family in the second half of the nineteenth century had less food than its predecessors in the twelfth: think of 1300 calories per person per day as a rough guess.</p>
<p>The technological dynamism and organizational relative edge that China had possessed in the twelfth century was gone as well. Chinese producers still had substantial technological edges in limited industrial segments: high end silk textiles, high-end porcelain, tea. But there had been little internally-driven technological progress in any industry for more than half a millennium. And the bureaucracy that in 1150 had looked efficient and powerful compared to a Europe—a place where no king would even think of asking an Earl of Pembroke to explain anything—by 1870 looked corrupt and incapable.</p>
<p>Why this 750 year relative stagnation is a great mystery. There are many potential suspects to take the blame as the root cause.</p>
<p>Perhaps the root problem was that emperors, grand secretaries, and landlords feared their own generals more than they feared their neighbors' soldiers. European kings, ministers, and landlords sought a strong military to protect them and theirs against the next William the Conqueror or Friedrich II or Francois I or Napoleon. In China there was little to fear from outside the empire as long as the Mongols were kept divided, but a great deal to be feared inside the empire from your own generals—men like the ninth-century An Lu-Shan or the seventeenth-century Three Feudatories. Thus the military-industrial-metallurgy-innovation complex that drove so much of pre-industrial and early-industrial European technological progress was absent.</p>
<p>Perhaps the root problem was that with triple-cropping rice strains the wet-rice fields were too fertile, the governmental bureaucracy too effective, and the avenues of establishment-oriented upward mobility to the striving and aggressive too open. After making a little money the logical next step was to buy some land. Because the land was rich, because labor was plentiful and cheap, and because the empire was (most of the time) strong internally, one could live well after turning one's wealth into land. One could also easily make the important social contacts to pave the way for one's children to advance further. And one's children could do the most important thing needed for upward mobility: study the Confucian classics and do well on the examinations: first the local shengyan, then the regional juren, and then the national jinshi. Those who had successfully written their eight-legged essays and made proper allusions to and use of the Confucian classics would then join the landlord-scholar-bureaucrat aristocracy that ruled China and profited from the empire. In the process of preparing for the examinations and mastering the material needed to do well on them, they would acquire the habits of thought and values of a Confucian aristocrat landlord-scholar-bureaucrat. Entrepreneurial drive and talent was thus molded into an orthodox Confucian-aristocratic pattern and harnessed to the service of the regime and of the landlord class: good for the rents of the landlords, good for the stability of the government, but possibly very bad indeed for the long-run development of technology and organization. Carlson (1957) quotes an imperial edict of 1724 condemning mining as a potential source of disorder and treason:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Miners are easy to recruit but hard to disband. If mining is left to the initiative of merchants there will be danger of crowds assembling and harboring treachery...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Perhaps the root problem was the absence of a new world rich in resources to exploit and helpless because of technological backwardness, or the lesser weight attached to instrumental rationality as a mode of thought, or the absence of dissenting hidey-holes for ideological unconformity, or the fact that the merchants and hand-manufacturers of China's cities were governed by landlords appointed by the central government rather than governing themselves, or that large muscled animals like oxen and horses turned out to be powerful productive multipliers for temperate rain-irrigated wheat-based agricultural but not for sub-tropical paddy-irrigated rice-based agriculture, or some combination of these, or any of a host of other possibilities over which historians will struggle inconclusively (but thoughtfully and fruitfully) for the rest of time.</p>
<p>Perhaps there were many root problems.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>5: China as of Mid-Nineteenth Century</strong></p>
<p>Whatever the cause, the result was China's extraordinary relative stagnation through much of the second millennium. The country and region that had been the world's leader—culturally, economically, organizationally—in 1200 was poor, economically backward, and organizationally decrepit by 1770, and much more so by 1870.</p>
<p>The poverty struck eighteenth-century British moral philosopher Adam Smith hard, for in his view China had been for a long time "the richest... most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous" country in which even landless peasants were relatively rich: “the wages of labour had ever been more than sufficient to... enable him to bring up a family.” Smith had a theory as to why the China he saw in his day—the late eighteenth century—had become poor. Because China would not trade with outsiders and so learn and adapt their ideas, it was bound to stagnate: “a country which neglects or despises foreign commerce... cannot transact the... business which it might do with different laws and institutions.” A stagnant economy, Smith thought, was headed for desperate poverty through a Malthusian population crisis. Population would continue to grow while the economy did not. Without technological progress and with increasing population “competition... would soon reduce [wages] to this lowest rate which is consistent with common humanity.” At that lowest rate of wages, children would be so malnourished as to be easy prey to disease and women's body fat levels would be so low that ovulation was hit-or-miss.</p>
<p>By 1870 it looked like that Malthusian crisis had arrived. The more than 300 million people of late nineteenth-century China had no mechanized farm machinery and no industry-produced nitrogen fertilizers. They were crowded into the wet, arable eastern slice of what is “China” on today's maps, with the median family of 6 farming perhaps 4 acres at a time when the Radical Republicans were still hoping to somehow find 40 acres plus a mule for each family of American ex-slaves. Average adult height was, we think, significantly under five feet. </p>
<p>After 1800 British merchants did discover one commodity besides silver that Indian producers could supply and that Chinese consumers were eager to buy: opium. By the end of the 1830s the Chinese government was beginning to worry about the consequences of opium addiction on the country, and the exchange of European silver for Chinese goods had turned around: the bulk of the China trade was the exchange of Chinese silver for Indian-grown opium. The Chinese government attempted to suppress the opium trade and opium smuggling. The result was the 1839-1842 "Opium War," in which the British fleet intervened on the side of free trade, the sale of opium, and drug addiction. The British Empire acquired the then nearly barren island of Hong Kong as a base, European influence was established in a substantial number of "treaty ports" along the Chinese coast, and the division of China not into European colonies but into regions in the "spheres of influence" of different European powers began.</p>
<p>Thus the first iron-hulled ocean-going steamships called on a country where the government and the economy were in crisis for three reasons:</p>
<p>The first reason is that China’s government in the late nineteenth century was the ethnically Manchurian Qing Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty was weak because it had always been weak. It had seized power in the mid-seventeenth century. An ethnic clan of non-proper-Chinese military adventurers from beyond the Great Wall, from Manchuria, struck at the moment when the previous Ming Dynasty was paralyzed by peasant revolts and hamstrung by a run of bad emperors and more-than-usually-corrupt bureaucrats. The Manchu were unified because they were not Han Chinese: what Manchu prince or mercenary could expect to long survive a victory by any alternative faction? The Manchu were weak because they were not Han Chinese: how many of the 300 million Chinese would give how much loyalty to a ruling dynasty in which the top places were reserved for others?</p>
<p>It was the classic problem of colonial rule. The Manchus tried to solve it by (a) presenting themselves as ideal Confucian sage-kings (presenting themselves as more righteous Confucian rulers than Kung-Fu-Tze himself), (b) giving the landlords through which they ruled free rein throughout central and southern China (curbing rapacious landlords in the interest of protecting the Old Hundred names of China was not on the Qing Dynasty agenda, ever), and (c) opposing all change for change threatened to cause instability and the Qing Dynasty knew that it was unstable already.</p>
<p>This worked as a political strategy: the Qing Dynasty had a run of 250 years, and the last Qing emperor still sat a throne—albeit as a puppet of the Japanese army—in 1945. But it meant that the kind of national and nationalist appeals that those who in Japan spoke for the Emperor Meiji or that Mongkut and Chulalongkorn used to try to preserve the independence of Thailand were impossible for China's late nineteenth-century government. You cannot rally a people against foreign colonialists with the slogan “revere the emperor and expel the barbarians!” when for more than 200 years the emperor has defined himself as non-Han—as a barbarian.</p>
<p>Even in the days of its peak strength, the Qing Dynasty found it wise to tolerate dominant currents of thought that viewed its coming to power as a tragedy and its rule as profoundly illegitimate. Jonathan Spence's In Search of Modern China notes the performances at the court of the Kangxi emperor, the first strong and long-lived Qing dynasty emperor, of "The Peach-Blossom Fan" by Kong Shangren—an author still loyal to the previous Ming Dynasty, and hostile to the idea that a scholar-official could win honor by helping the Manchu conquerors rule China: “[A]t the play's end, with the Ming resistance in ruins, the lovers agree to take monastic vows... the surviving virtuous officials retreat deep into the mountains to escape a summons from the Qing that they take up office.”</p>
<p>The second reason that China in the late nineteenth century was in crisis was that Confucian landlord-bureaucrat-scholar aristocracy through which the Qing Dynasty ruled was not only potentially disloyal but trained to be incapable. As long as the Mongols were kept divided through bribes and the ruling dynasty uncorrupt, no Chinese emperor faced any outside existential military threat. Internal disorder was the main worry. So the central government had discouraged military skill among its bureaucrats and notables since the Tang dynasty rebellion of An Lushan, and discouraged any liking for change—a potential cause of disorder—since the first Ming dynasty emperor had expelled the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan in the fourteenth century.</p>
<p>Seventeenth-century China was well aware of growing European technological developments. Yet neither Kong Shangren nor any of his relatives and descendants ever thought that the optical glass business was worth studying or researching or entering or even financing. It was simply not the kind of thing that a Confucian gentleman would do. One consequence of this lamentable uncuriosity was extraordinary ignorance about the outside world. During the first Opium War of 1840 the staff of High Commissioner Lin, the Qing plenipotentiary on the spot in Canton, appears to have debated whether an embargo of rhubarb exports might be enough all on its own to win the war for China.</p>
<p>The third reason China's government was in crisis was that the people were in crisis. As I noted above, China's population was on the downswing of a Malthusian population cycle. Compared to the aftermath of the great wave of agricultural technological development nearly a millennium before, the threefold growth in population meant that yields per person were low, farms small, and peasants poor—hence malnourished, and with relatively little energy. Population growth also meant larger clans of landlords to be fed off the rents. Combined with an alien ruling dynasty that feels weak and threatened by its own upper class and tells its bureaucrats that it is justice when the landlords win, this means that the peasants have very little to lose. Thus peasant revolts—like those that everyone remembered had brought down dynasties before—burned through China in the mid-nineteenth century.</p>
<p>The greatest was the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 that ravaged central China for fifteen years, aided by the fact that the imperial court feared successful generals (as potential usurpers) at least as much as it feared the rebels. There were enough landless and other desperate peasants that perhaps ten million joined Hong Xiuquan, who had hoped to become a bureaucrat-scholar-landlord but failed the shengyan examinations several times. He then had visions that convinced him that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. The Manchu banner-armies proved useless when Hong proclaimed the “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace,” and promised his followers not only the Kingdom of Heaven in the hereafter (where he would reign alongside his elder brother Jesus Christ) but that land would be equally divided after all the landlords were killed down here—meaning a roughly fifty percent increase in median peasant standards of living. And Hong Xiuquan supplemented his brand of theocratic landlord-free authoritarian communism with anti-Manchu nationalism: "Ever since the Manchus poisoned China... the poison of corruption has defiled the emperor's throne...” 1300 calories per day versus 2000 plus God on your side plus revenge against the oppressive landlords plus the expulsion of the barbarian Manchus.</p>
<p>The fifteen-year march of the Taiping through south-central China and reign from Nanjing had echoes not just of previous peasant rebellions (like the one that had given the Manchus their opening in the 1640s at the end of the Ming dynasty) but of what Mao Zedong and company would do from 1925 to 1945. Move into a village, get the peasants' hands dirty by having them kill a couple of landlords, divide up the land so all the small peasants are much richer, point out that if the landlord-backed authorities return they will all be in big trouble, and ask for volunteers to join the army and come along to the next village.</p>
<p>The Taiping prohibited opium, foot-binding, prostitution, and female servitude. They instituted equal shares for all, vaccination, low taxes, and encouraged tea and silk exports. Hugh Deane quotes American missionary E.C. Bridgeman's report that the Taiping "appear[ed] like a new race of warriors... well-clad, well-fed, and well-provided for... content and in high spirits, as if sure of success," and asserts that twentieth century Communist leaders like Mao Zedong, Zhu Te, and Peng Dehaui drew inspiration from the stories of the Taiping heroes that they had grown up with in Hunan, Sichuan, and Nanjing.</p>
<p>Outside observers like Karl Marx were impressed enough that they thought that the World Revolution was starting in the late 1850s in China, and that the last moments of the Chinese empire had come. But they did not win.</p>
<p>Competent local landlords organized pickup militias, some of which grew into competent—but non-Manchu—battalions and brigades. The merchants and bankers of Shanghai and other ports in contact with and profiting from European trade were desperate for help and knew how to draw on European military-technological competence. The thirty year-old Frederick Ward Townsend—with, Deane reports, two years' experience as a military cadet in Norwich, Vermont followed by service as a Texas Ranger, a Mexican army drill instructor, and in the Crimean War—organized an army on the British Indian sepoy model: officers from Europe and America, rifles and carbines and cannon supplied by the British government, high pay, and river mobility through steampower. The Qing court heard such good things about his army from Li Hongzhang, their commander on the spot, that they named Ward's army “The Undefeatables.” Ward was killed at Ningbo in 1862, but his successor the British General Charles “Chinese” Gordon's army proved equally capable. </p>
<p>Perhaps 10 million people, 3% of China's population, died in the war. The Taiping were crushed in 1864. China's political revolution was postponed for half a century, and the Qing Dynasty continued to rule until 1911.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>6: No Equivalent of the Meiji Restoration</strong></p>
<p>Western China specialists sometimes see and can almost touch an alternative history—one in which late-nineteenth century China stood up economically, politically, and organizationally. Japan, after all, won its short victorious war against Russia in 1905, negotiated as an equal with Britain and the U.S. over warship construction in 1921, and was perhaps the eighth industrial power in the world by 1929. Jonathan Spence, for example, sees:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Confucian statesmen [like Li Hongzhang] whose skill, integrity, and tenacity helped suppress the [Taiping and other] rebellions... showed how imaginatively the Chinese could respond to new challenges... managed to develop new structures to handle foreign relations and collect customs dues, to build modern ships and weapons, and to start teaching international law and the rudiments of modern science.... It was true that there remained complex problems... rural militarization... local autonomy over taxation... landlord abuses... bureaucratic corruption... bellicose foreign powers.... But with forceful imperial leadership and a resolute Grand Council, it appeared that the Qing Dynasty might regain some of its former strength...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And he laments how due to the chances of politics:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Forceful leadership was not forthcoming... the empress dowager Cixi... coregent for her son Tongzhi from 1861-73... coregent for her nephew Guangxu from 1875-89.... [A]bsolute political authority... while Guangxu [was imprisoned in the palace]... on her orders from 1898-1908.... Cixi had clashed badly in 1869 with Prince Gong.... Zeng Guofan died in 1872... Wenxiang died in 1876... Zuo Zongtang remained preoccupied with the pacification of the Muslims in [Xinjiang].... The grand councilors... worthy... with distinguished careers... lacked the skill or initiative to direct China on a new course. Although self-strengthening programs continued to be implemented... a disproportionate number of them were initiated by one man, Li Hongzhang... governor-general of Hebei... commissioner of trade for the northern ports...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We economists are much more skeptical. We note that the "new structures” were things like the Qing Imperial Maritime Customs Service built up in the 1860s under Robert Hart—no Chinese officials allowed, largely out of fear that their corruption would have been impossible to moderate given the ties to Qing Dynasty high politicians they would have had to have possessed in order to get appointed in the first place. We note the corrupt and incompetent bureaucracies that failed to manage the Yellow River dikes and the Grand Canal. We note that the Qing could not get their local officials to collect the salt tax. </p>
<p>In the mid-1880s the Qing Dynasty, having bought foreign metal-working machinery and built a navy, arsenals, and docks, thought it was strong enough to oppose the French conquest of Vietnam. The fleet was destroyed in an hour. Jonathan Spence reports that the Chinese navy lost 572 dead, while the French lost five. In 1895 the Qing Dynasty thought it was strong enough to oppose the Japanese extension of their sphere of influence to Korea. It was wrong. The Treaty of Shimonoseki added Taiwan, Korea, and southern Manchuria to Japan's sphere of influence. In 1929 China produced 20K tons of steel—less than two ounces per person per year. It produced 400K tons of iron—that's 1.6 pounds per person per year. It mined 27M tons of coal—that's 100 pounds per person per year. Compare this to America's 700 pounds of steel per capita in 1929 or 200 pounds in 1900, or to America's 8000 pounds of coal per capita in 1929 or 5000 pounds of coal per capita in 1900.</p>
<p>We do not find it satisfactory to attribute China's stagnation through the first decade of the twentieth century to poor choice of ministers by the Dragon Lady, the Dowager Empress Cixi. Jonathan Spence is following in a long tradition that treats her as the original mold for the figure of the Evil Dragon Lady. But one manipulative and malevolent female is rarely the cause of the decline of empires.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>6.1: The Disproportionate Man</em></p>
<p>Recall Jonathan Spence’s “[of] self-strengthening programs... a disproportionate number of them were initiated by one man, Li Hongzhang…” who we have just seen as a man-on-the-spot during the Taiping Rebellion. But he was not the only loyal servant of the Qing Dynasty. It had many—skilled scholars, administrators, and military politicians who might well have seen it as their duty to do for China what those who restored the Emperor Meiji were doing in Japan and what the servants of Mongkut and Chulalongkorn were trying to do in the Kingdom of Siam—now Thailand. Why were there not others? Let us look at Li Hongzhang’s career: </p>
<p>Li Hongzhang (李鸿章, 1823-1901) was born in 1823 in Qunzhi, Modian, ten miles northeast of the Anhui Province capital of Hefei. He was of the scholar-gentry class: like his father one of the literati-landlord-officials who combined their intellectual, plutocratic, and bureaucratic power to rule China under the emperor in Beijing—but since “the mountains are high, and the emperor is far” the emperor’s theoretically absolute power was very limited in practice. With the leisure to study—and the focus because only by studying hard could he rise and secure the future fortunes of his family—he flourished. Tutored by prominent military politician Zeng Guofan (曾國藩, 1811-72), in 1847 he obtained the highest examination degree, the jinshi, and two years later saw him admitted to China’s Harvard or perhaps its Ecole Normal Superieur: the Hanlin Academy. </p>
<p>But rather than rising through the Beijing-based bureaucracy, a few years later sees him detached from the Beijing bureaucracy and back in his home lower Yangzi Valley: the Taiping Rebellion had led him to return home and, outside the Imperial administrative system, raise a unit of local militia to defend their homes and their property from the rebels. The governor trying to contain the rebellion, his former tutor Zeng Guofan, noticed him—and took Li Hongzhang on as one of his protégés. </p>
<p>He rose, becoming an ace troubleshooter. </p>
<p>Soon after the 1864 final suppression of the Taiping, he was sent to Shandong to deal with the Nien Rebellion. 1870 sees him promoted to Viceroy of Chihli, at the age of 47 one of the very highest-ranking administrators in China. And from that perch he was to spend the rest of his life trying to salvage the situation for the dynasty he served.</p>
<p>Li Hongzhang’s achievements at economic development—self-strengthening (洋務運動)—were indeed impressive: bureaucratic prime mover behind the 1877 Kaiping coal mine, the 1878 cotton mills in Shanghai, the Tianjin arsenal, the telegraph between Tianjin and Peking, a seven-mile railroad to ship from Kaiping to the river and then downriver to Tianjin, and so forth. </p>
<p>Moreover, what successful self-strengthening programs were undertaken by Li Hongzhang appears likely to have been undertaken by only one other: Zhang Zhidong, governor-general of Hunan-Hubei for two decades: the railroad from Hankou to Beijing, the Wuhan Han-Ye-Ping heavy industrial complex. In the last generation of the Qing empire, individual governors-general who made economic development a top priority could make some things happen—elsewhere it didn't, save to some degree in and next to the foreign concessions and treaty ports: Qingdao, Tientsin, Shanghai, Guangdong, Hong Kong. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the last years of the Qing empire and the first years of the Republic of China, economic growth and development took place around China's coastal fringes in and near foreign enclaves, but not elsewhere. </p>
<p>It seems to us here and now today that, in the years before World War I, the example of the industrial core seemed easy to follow. Inventing the technologies of the original industrial revolution—steam power, spinning mills, automatic looms, iron- and steel-making, and railroad-building—had required many independent strokes of genius. But copying the technologies did not, especially when you could buy and cheaply ship industrial capital goods made in the same New and Old England machine shops that supplied the industries of England and of America. If Ford could redesign production immediately after World war I so that semi-skilled assembly line workers could do what highly-skilled craftsmen used to do, why couldn't Ford also—or someone else—redesign production before World War I so that it could be carried out by low wage Peruvians or Poles or Kenyans rather than by Americans, who were extraordinarily expensive labor by world standards eve back then?</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>6.2: Li Hongzhang's Kaiping Coal Mine</em></p>
<p>Let us look at one of Li Hongzhang’s major projects, the Kaiping coal mine. We are lucky in that we can draw on Ellsworth Carlson's 1957 Harvard east asian monograph to understand how and to what extent Li Hongzhang could midwife modern coal-mining technology in late-nineteenth century China.
In 1877 Li Hongzhang—a senior scholar-landlord-bureaucrat high in the confidence of the Qing court—joined forces with Tang Tingshu—a prominent, experienced, and wealthy treaty port comprador-merchant who had managed Jardine, Matheson's interests along the Yangtze—to establish a modern, industrial, large-scale coal mine in Kaiping, in Chihli. Li Hongzhang and Tang Tingshu faced unusual forms of opposition to their mining plans. Carlson quotes a British cable of 1882 stating that mining work had been stopped because Chi Shihchang, a vice-president of the Board of Civil Offices, had declared that "foreign mining methods angered the earth dragon... [and so] the late empress could not rest quietly in her grave" sixty miles away from Kaiping:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Foreign mining methods angered the earth dragon... [and so] the late empress could not rest quietly in her grave.... The Governor-General has been ordered to make inquiry and report... work has partially ceased.... Either he must throw over a company... formed with his direct sanction... [and] a very large quantity of capital, or he must... declare the mines harmless with the knowledge that he will then be considered responsible for any bodily ailment or other ill which may befall the Emperor or his family...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Given the size of the imperial family and mortality and morbidity rates in the late nineteenth century, it would be a brave bureaucrat indeed who would respond to this by certifying that there was no geomantic danger to the grave of the late empress sixty miles away from the mine works.</p>
<p>Li Hongzhang was a brave bureaucrat indeed.</p>
<p>Tang Tingshu had originally proposed to build a steam railway to get the coal from the mines to the port of Tientsin, but dropped that idea and replace it with a proposal for a seven mile mule-drawn tramway to be connected to a twenty-one mile canal. Shen Pao-chen had in 1877 dismantled China's first railway—the Shanghai-Woosung. According to David Pong, Li Hongzhang was furious, blaming the destruction on Shen's narrow-mindedness and his desire to curry favor with anti-foreign elements. Moreover, the Manchu court had just rejected Liu Mingchuan's request for permission to build railways. </p>
<p>When the mining began and the tramway started up, however, there were no mules: there was a locomotive—the "Rocket of China" with, engineer Claude Kinder reported, a boiler from "a portable winding engine, the wheels had been purchased as scrap castings, the frames... made of cast iron." Ellsworth Carlson believes that Li Hongzhang and Tang Tingshu were able to get their steam railroad going because of three reasons. First, it was built in a remote and sparsely populated area with no Confucian scholar-landlord-bureaucrats around. Second, Li Hongzhang used all his political skills to keep the existence of the steam railroad. Third, Carlson believes that Li had the blessing of the empress dowager Cixi to proceed—and thus her protection from his superiors on the Grand Council and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Production began with modern machinery—for the day—in 1881 excavating coal up to 500 feet down. By 1889, 3000 workers in three shifts were producing 700 tons of coal a day using steam lifts underground coal cars on rails, and pneumatic drills. By 1900, 9000 workers were producing 200 tons a coal a day, with average pay 6 dollars per month and with at least some Chinese-born technical employees making 60 dollars. About four miners died each year. As Herbert Hoover (yes, that Herbert Hoover: at the time a 26 year-old mining engineer on the make, later to become the architect of food relief to Europe after World War I to prevent mass starvation, the wonder-working Commerce Secretary during the Roaring Twenties, and president during the slide into the Great Depression) reported:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The disregard for human life permits cheap mining by economy in timber [supports].... The aggrieved relatives are amply compensated by... 30 dollars per man.... Cases have been proved of suicide for that amount...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hoover's judgment was that the miners were producing 1/4 of what was expected of miners in America or Australia. The rate of production was nearly 500 pounds per worker per day, but still only six pounds a year for every person in China. There was still no railway all the way to Tientsin. The railway had been built down to Taku, but Chief Engineer Claude Kinder reported:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>High officials who detested the railway... foster[ed] trouble with the junk people.... So great was the clamor... that the Viceroy... gave the order for the nearly completed bridge [over the Peiho to Tientsin] to be destroyed, although hundreds of the largest junks had already safely passed through...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Without the aegis of Li Hongzhang and his position as governor, the enterprise is unlikely to have survived. Ellsworth Carswell quotes Tang Shouchien on the difficulties that merchants and entrepreneurs had outside the coastal foreign concessions: “The officials have rights; the merchants have no rights; their influence does not go beyond the bringing together of capital; and naturally the profits of the merchants are lost to the officials ceaselessly…” </p>
<p>Even with his aegis, not everything went smoothly. Carswell quotes the North China Herald of June 24, 1887 as pessimistic about the future of Kaiping as a capitalist economic enterprise: “if a mine is at a promising state, Kaiping to wit, the kinsmen of the Director, Managers, and officials, come in shoals, and without the slightest regard to competence are provided with posts and fatten…” But as long as Li Hongzhang was in control and his attention was focused on making the mine a successful economic enterprise, Tang Tingshu, his team, and his specialist foreign engineers could do their work. </p>
<p>Their position, however, was shaky, for the mine was both a public governmental project and a private capitalist enterprise: shang-pan kuan-tu: official supervision and merchant management. This meant that each manager of the mine wore two hats: on the one hand, they were intendants in the Qing administrative bureaucracy, with jurisdiction not over a town and its villages but over a mining enterprise, and on the other hand they were employees of the shareholders. Should push come to shove, it would turn out that they worked for the governor of Chihli rather than the shareholders of the company.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>6.3: Herbert Hoover Takes a Hand</em></p>
<p>Mine director-general Tang Tingshu died in 1892. His successor was a very different man. Tang Tingshu was a merchant. Chang Yenmao was not a merchant or an industrialist or an engineer. Chang Yenmao was a bannerman—a hereditary retainer of Prince Qun. Tang Tingshu was a merchant who had worked extensively for British bosses. Chang Yenmao was a political fixer for the Empress Dowager Cixi. In The Making of Herbert Hoover, Rose Wilder Lane claims that Chang Yenmao had played a key role in Cixi's coup of 1885, when she placed the Gwangxu emperor on the throne.</p>
<p>Chang Yenmao had little education. In spite of his lack of literary attainment, he had acquired official rank. He was slotted to become an intendant in Kaingsu when the director-generalship of Kaiping fell vacant. his replacement, but rather a hereditary retainer of Prince Qun and a political fixer for the Empress Dowager Cixi. </p>
<p>By 1900 Chang Yenmao was perhaps the wealthiest man in Tientsin. </p>
<p>When Herbert Hoover looked at the books he reported that the 9000-worker payroll had been padded by 6000 names, and that the director of personnel doing the padding and collecting the wages had paid Chang Yenmao £10000—50,000 dollars—for the post.</p>
<p>Chang Yenmao's company paid £20000—100000 dollars—a year in dividends. Herbert Hoover took over in 1901, and was able to pay out £150,000—750,000 dollars—a year—to the shareholders as dividends.</p>
<p>Herbert Hoover? you say. Yes, Herbert Hoover: at the time a 26 year old mining engineer on the make, later to become the architect of food relief to Europe after World War I to prevent mass starvation, the wonder- working Commerce Secretary during the Roaring Twenties, and president during the slide into the Great Depression.</p>
<p>What happened was this: Herbert Hoover, mining expert, arrived in Tientsin in 1900 just in time to be besieged in the city by the Boxers (a better translation for this grassroots uprising influenced and encouraged but not controlled by the Forbidden City would have been "Fighters United for Justice"). In Tientsin Hoover met Gustav Detring of the China Maritime Customs Service, a friend of Chang Yenmao's. He also met Chang Yenmao. Chang had fled to Tientsin as well, fearing that the Boxers would execute him as a corrupt puppet of the Europeans; in Tientsin, however, the Europeans arrested Chang—fearing, probably correctly, that he was passing intelligence to the besieging Boxer armies as a way of hedging his bets. The British charge d'affaires on the scene later said that Chang "ought to have been shot in 1900.”</p>
<p>Somehow Detring and Hoover, probably, got Chang released from prison. Somehow Chang decided to reincorporate the Kaiping mines as a British-flag enterprise incorporated in London in order, he said, to make it easier to raise capital to expand the mines and to provide some political cover: Russian or Japanese proconsuls would love to confiscate a working Chinese-flag industrial property as reparations or indemnities, but would not dare touch a British-flag industrial property. Chang commissioned Detring and then Detring and Chang commissioned Hoover and then Hoover commissioned his boss C. Algernon Moreing back in London to do the deal.</p>
<p>Chang’s old Kaiping Mine Company had owned the mine works, had little spare cash, and had owed £250,000—1.25 million dollars—in bonds that paid 12% per year interest. Hoover’s new Kaiping Mine Company borrowed £500,000 at 6%, paid off the old bonds, and had £250,000 in cash to expand. Herbert Hoover, his bosses, and his friends somehow owned 62.5% of the new company, without having committed any funds to the enterprise at all, leaving the shareholders of the old company owning 37.5% of the new company. The old company had been controlled completely by Chang Yenmao in his dual status as director-general both elected by the shareholders and appointed by the governor of Chihli. The new company was controlled completely by Herbert Hoover as the representative on the spot of the London-based majority shareholders. The old company had a management and advanced technical staff of 620 Chinese managers and 10 foreign-born engineers and foremen. The new company had a management and advanced technical staff of 170: 120 from china and 50 from abroad.</p>
<p>The new company also had a Europeans-only club.</p>
<p>The local judgment of those on the spot was that Hoover and company had:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>made a pretty pile at the expense of the Chinese.... legally the Board of Directors were unassailable... but... morally they were in the wrong.... [Britain should not] give its countenance to a financial transaction which had fleeced Chinese shareholders... lined the pockets of an Anglo-Belgian gang...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And Chang Yenmao and his associates were "wild... [because] they thought themselves rather smarter... and got themselves fairly had by a Yankee man of straw [Hoover]."</p>
<p>We can try to read Herbert Hoover’s mind: Perhaps Herbert Hoover thought that the old shareholders should be grateful that Hoover and his partners had only charged them only 62.5% of the company because:</p>
<ul>
<li>The alternative was for the Russians to have confiscated the entire mine as war reparations, leaving old shareholders with zero.</li>
<li>Chang Yenmao was a corrupt thief, untouchable because of his status in the Qing court. He was stealing from the company by padding the payroll with 6000 extra workers at 50 dollars a year. That’s 300,000 dollars a year stolen. We got that back for the shareholders.</li>
<li>Hoover would make the mine run productively and profitably. Chang Yenmao, neither a mining engineer nor a merchant, could not</li>
<li>The old shareholders’ 37.5% of the post-Hoover 750,000 dollars a year in dividends is about 270,000 dollars—that is nearly three times the 100,000 dollars a year in dividends the old company had paid: Hoover had thus nearly tripled the value of the old stockholders’ shares.</li>
</ul>
<p>62.5% of the company, Hoover would perhaps have said, is a bargain price for the old shareholders to pay for all we have done and will do for them.</p>
<p>Chang Yenmao, however, had to explain to Yuan Shihkai, the new Governor-General of Chihli, that he had conspired or western sharpies had tricked him or something had happened by which what Yuan Shihkai thought was the strategic imperial government enterprise of the Kaiping mine was now the property of a British-Belgian investors' syndicate. Yuan Shihkai was displeased:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The mines had not been started... [until] Li Hongzhang had... obtained imperial approval... they could not be alienated without imperial approval.... Chang, said Yuan, was a person of humble origins to whom the country had given great favors, but he had not been properly grateful... [had sold] mining land [to foreigners] without authority... deceived the throne... about Chinese-foreign joint management.... If unpunished, Chang's action might become a precedent... losses of the country's mines, the merchant's capital, and the dynasty's ports...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Chang Yenmao, ordered to recover the mines, went to London and sued. </p>
<p>In the process of browbeating Chang Yenmao, Herbert Hoover had signed a "Memorandum of Understanding" that the change of corporate form would not alter Chang Yenmao's status: that he would remain director-general of the mine "as before.” That Memorandum was then ignored.</p>
<p>One British judge was shocked at the deception and dishonor, and ruled that the "Memorandum" was a valid instrument that had to be followed by the new company. Other British judges in London ruled that the "Memorandum" was a valid instrument only insofar as the powers granted Chang by the memorandum were legal according to British corporate law, but that those powers weren't. </p>
<p>So British judges in London ultimately ruled that Hoover, as a mere employee of the new shareholders, had no power to sign a memorandum giving up the shareholders’ power to choose the director-general they wanted. LLater on, Herbert Hoover scrambled as he launched his political career to buy up and destroy all copies of the trial record containing his testimony—missing the one in Oxford's Bodleian Library.</p>
<p>In the end Yuan Shihkai started up another coal company with rights to much more extensive deposits in the area, and the two were amicably merged.</p>
<p>As Albert Feuerworker summed up the story of Kaiping in the 1959 Journal of Asian Studies:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Despite its pioneering achievements, Kaiping faltered... [like] other kuan-tu shang-pan enterprises in the late nineteenth century. The first was the lack of sufficient capital and the inability to raise more from domestic sources. The second was the unpropitious political environment into which it was born. Little aid could be expected from the tottering Manchu regime either in the form of financial assistance to compensate for the reluctance of private investors, or protection from foreign encroachment such as eventuated in British domination of this enterprise.... [T]he contrast with the history of early industrial efforts in Meiji Japan is a striking one...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Feuerworker sees three things going wrong: no private capital, a poor cash-strapped government that could not contribute public capital, and a weak government that could not protect incipient enterprises against rapacious foreigners. These three were certainly important, yes, but I see three others that were even more important:</p>
<ul>
<li>a social-economic structure that could not find and promote executives, but instead replaced Tang Tingshu with a corrupt political fixer like Chang Yenmao</li>
<li>a political-ritual culture that required that a modernizing governor focus his attention constantly on the enterprise and run interference to protect it from anti-modernizers</li>
<li>an educational system that continued to turn out literati instead of engineers and thus required foreign technical personnel for everything</li>
</ul>
<p>The fact is that, outside the charmed circles created by the extraterritorial foreign concessions, and to a slight degree the immediate span of control of the few modernizing governors, modern industries did not develop and modern technologies were simply not applied in late imperial China. The typical Qing bureaucrat was hostile. But the typical Qing bureaucrat was also interested. There was rough equilibrium in how much money Qing bureaucrats were expected to squeeze from landlords (not that much), merchants and traders (significant but limited), and others who needed government action (as much as they could grab). </p>
<p>New people doing new things had no customary, social, or countervailing power protections against their overlords. And overlords with limited intelligence, limited types of experience, and limited official tenure could not be expected to nurture economic growth when there were loose assets to be stripped. And, as the shareholders of Kaiping and Chang Yenmao discovered, to flee into the arms of foreign legal systems was to flee from Scylla to Charybdis.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>7: The End of Imperial China</strong></p>
<p>The loss of the Japanese-Chinese War in 1895 brought matters to a head: was the government going to make a more serious effort to mobilize the country for modernization and progress or not? The Guangxu emperor said yes: he allied himself with reformer Kang Youwei and launched the "hundred days of reform" of 1898. The rest of the Qing power structure, especially the dowager empress Cixi—who we have seen before as patron and protector of modernizer Li Hongzhang—said no. she imprisoned the emperor inside the palace and encouraged the grassroots “Fighters United for Justice” to see what would happen. </p>
<p>The attempt to mobilize anti-European sentiment to support the conservative regime failed, as an all-European expeditionary force relieved the besieged European embassies in Beijing, exacted indemnities, and wreaked destruction. </p>
<p>A tack back to the left was not possible. Kang Youwei's memoranda on such things as the partition of weak-government Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria and on the successful Meiji reforms in Japan could still be read, but Cixi had executed Kang Youwei's younger brother and other reformers in 1898. And when Sun Yatsen had offered his services to Li Hongzhang in 1894, Li had sent him away.</p>
<p>Sun Yatsen built up a financial and propaganda network among Chinese emigrants beyond the reach of the government. Military politicians like Yuan Shihkai came to the conclusion that working with the Manchu court was useless. And at the beginning of 1912 the last Chinese imperial dynasty fell, as Yuan Shihkai and his peers refused to suppress Sun Yatsen's rebellions. The six-year-old emperor abdicated. But the new Chinese republic's president was military politician Yuan Shihkai. And his authority over his peers and near peers—army commanders, provincial governors, and other would-be warlords—was nil. China descended into near-anarchy.</p>
<p>With China thus hors de combat and with the high civilizations of India and Islam in no better shape, the world—that in 1870 the submarine telegraph cable and the iron-hulled ocean-going screw-propeller steamship were about to make a very small world after all indeed—would become a North Atlantic-dominated world for quite a while.</p>
<hr />
<pre><code>#slouchingtowardsutopia #outtake
</code></pre>
<h6>This File: <a href="https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/why-was-the-20th-century-not-a-chinese-century.html">https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/why-was-the-20th-century-not-a-chinese-century.html</a></h6>
<h6>Edit This File: <a href="https://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/post/6a00e551f0800388340240a470f044200d/edit">https://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/post/6a00e551f0800388340240a470f044200d/edit</a></h6>
#slouchingtowardsutopiaJ. Bradford DeLong2019-03-18T12:02:24-07:00